We are pleased to announce the General Availability of VMware Chargeback™ 8.10 On-Prem, formerly known as vRealize Operations Tenant App™, covering new pricing and metering capabilities.
VMware Chargeback v8.10 is included for cloud providers with the purchase of VMware Cloud Director™. Partners interested in learning more can reach out to their VMware sales team.
Before we dive in further to know what’s new with this release, please note:
- vRealize Operations Tenant App is now rebranded to VMware Chargeback.
- The previous release of the vRealize Operations Tenant App was v8.6, and the next release is the current one, VMware Chargeback v8.10.
- VMware Chargeback is now available as a SaaS offering, The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering will be available as early access, with limited availability, with the purchase or trial of the VMware Cloud Director™ service. See, Announcing VMware Chargeback for Managed Service Providers Blog.
What is VMware Chargeback?
VMware Chargeback enables metering and chargeback capabilities, along with providing visibility into infrastructure usage through performance and capacity dashboards for the providers and tenants.
To help Cloud Providers and tenants realise more value for every dollar they spend on infrastructure (ROI) (and in turn provide similar value to their tenants), our focus is to not only expand the coverage of services that can be priced in VMware Chargeback, but also to provide visibility into the cost of infrastructure to providers, and billing summary to organizations, clearly highlighting the cost incurred by various business units.
What’s New in VMware Chargeback v8.10 on-prem and VMware Chargeback service?
Bill summary for organizations and visibility into infrastructure cost
Bill summary for organizations
In addition to charging the various business units or generating bills at the organization VDC level, providers could provide a bill summary at an organization level, clearly segregating the cost incurred by the various business units. In addition to organization-level bills acting as a summary, it would also help providers charge for resources consumed at an organization level rather than at an individual business unit level.
Visibility into infrastructure cost
Providers can now see the various cost metrics, such as unallocated cost, in the different overview sections. The total price and cost visibility is meant to give providers a sense of Profit and loss for their infrastructure investments.
Note: The above screenshot is just an example from one of the dashboards. Cost visibility is available in various places like dashboards, reports, billing, etc.!
Pricing expansion to new services
Pricing NSX Advanced Load Balancer/ AVI Load Balancer
Providers can now charge for consumption of NSX® Advanced Load balancer™ based on throughput. They can create slabs with different rates for throughput values.
Pricing Cloudian Storage
Providers can now charge for consumption of Cloudian storage, based on storage. They can create slabs with different rates for storage values. Billable only at the organization level.
UI Enhancements
Operations Overview Dashboard Enhancements
To ensure providers and their tenants get quick access to relevant information, Operations Overview Dashboard has been updated. The dashboards Overviews and Pricing Policy section have been revamped to provide a more intuitive sequential flow in the pricing policy and to include essential metrics on the home page.
Filter Option on list view Dashboards
Have a large customer base and inventory? You can now filter any available item in a list view and find the objects quickly and easily.
What are the additional options available only in the VMware Chargeback service offering?
Getting Started Page (VMware Chargeback service Only)
In the VMware Chargeback service offering to get started with the chargeback service, you will be guided on how to perform a step-by-step configuration process to start collecting the data.
Bill Data Retention (VMware Chargeback service Only)
View and manage historical data retention-related system settings. Users can tune these settings to manage storage space consumed by the VMware Chargeback Service. You can configure the number of days to retain the generated bills.
Auto Discovery (VMware Chargeback service Only)
VMware Chargeback service will auto-discover the Cloud Director service instances at the time of initial configuration. After that, the Cloud Director service instances can be discovered with a single click.
Supportability
Cloud Providers should use VMware Chargeback on-prem for managing VMware Cloud Director (VCD) and note that VMware Chargeback service will support metering VMware Cloud Director™ service (CDs) as of this release.
Licensing updates
- VMware Chargeback backed by vRealize Operations with Standard license will now include OOTB dashboard access for Organization, Organization VDC, vApps, Virtual Machines, etc., by default to the providers and tenants.
- Previously only a provider admin could select the metrics from the Metrics selector sections. However, with this release, the capability is also being extended to the tenants.
Upgrade Path for VCD Mode
You can download VMware Chargeback on-prem v8.10 from here.
| Current Version | Path | Target Version | How to upgrade? |
| 8.6.2 GA | Direct to 8.10 | 8.10 | iso-upgrade/ update-repo |
| 2.6.3 GA | Direct to 8.10 | 8.10 | iso-upgrade/update-repo |
| 2.5.2 GA | Step1: Upgrade to 2.6.3 Step2: From 2.6.3 upgrade to 8.10 | 8.10 | iso-upgrade/update-repo |
| 2.4.2 GA | Step1: Upgrade to 2.5.2 Step2: From 2.5.2 upgrade to 2.6.3 Step3: From 2.6.3 upgrade to 8.10 | 8.10 | iso-upgrade/update-repo |
No Upgrades are performed for VC mode currently.
Compatibility with vRealize Operations
- Only vRealize Operations v8.10 will be compatible with VMware Chargeback v8.10 because there are many pricing and billing engine updates in vRealize Operations 8.10, which are used by VMware Chargeback 8.10.
- If any customer is not in a state to upgrade to VMware Chargeback v8.10 and wants to use vRealize Operations v8.10, then on case to case basis, a hotfix will be released.
Note: VMware Chargeback versioning number will align with vRealize Operations versioning.
VMware Cloud Director Compatibility
VMware Cloud Director versions 10.2.2, 10.3.0, 10.3.1, 10.3.2, 10.3.3, and 10.4.0 are compatible as of this release date. For future VMware Cloud Director release support and compatibility, please refer to the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix.
What next?
For more details and understanding see the following documentation:
- Release notes for vRealize Operations Management Pack
- VMware Chargeback for VCD for a Service Provider
- VMware Chargeback for VCD for a Tenant
- VMware Chargeback getting started guide
- One pager
- Demo video
- Find assets for the vRealize Operations here and for the Cloud Director services here.
Remember, to get the latest updates, check this blog regularly, you also can find us on Slack, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn as well as many demo videos and enablement on YouTube, especially our Feature Fridays series.
Please contact the Product Manager at [email protected] for any detailed queries related to VMware Chargeback on-prem.
