The Question

As customers are starting to adopt and consume VMware products through subscription, it becomes increasingly important to understand how many billable resources each product is counting.

In this blog, we will talk about how Aria Automation customers discern this information from the product.

What is counted?

With Aria Automation being a multi-cloud management offering, two types of environments should be considered, Native Public Clouds (NPC) and VMware Clouds.

NPC resources include native resources in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Engine (GCE) and Microsoft Azure.

VMware resources include both on-premises and VMware SDDC solutions, including: VMC on AWS, Azure VMware Services (AVS), Google VMware Cloud Engine (GCVE) and Oracle Cloud VMware Services (OCVS).

Resources of each type are quantified in similar, but slightly different manners.

NPC resources are quantified by Operating System Instance (OSI). As of this posting, the only NPC resources counted for billing are Virtual Machines (VMs) at a one-to-one ratio. One VM counts as one OSI.

When viewing consumption of vSphere resources, one must consider the licensure or method of consumption. There is a difference in how vSphere resources are quantified when using Aria Automation through Aria Universal Suite (formerly vRealize Cloud Universal) licensing versus standalone.

When Aria Automation is purchased as part of a bundle, for example, Aria Universal Suite, vSphere resources are quantified by core.

Otherwise, when Aria Automation is purchased separately, each VM is considered as an OSI, similarly to the NPC resources. No matter the VM size, each VM will only count as one billable OSI.

At time of posting, resources counted toward billing include only those VMs either Deployed or Onboarded within Aria Automation. Deployed or Onboarded resources count toward billing whether they are running or not (VM State of On or Off).

To reduce the number of billed resources, there is a Day 2 action to unregister resources: Remove Resources.

Neither Discovered nor Missing resources count toward billing.

Counting Resources

There is a new View Your Billable Objects widget on the Aria Automation home page. When the twisty is open, you see billable resources from vSphere, VMC, and Public Clouds.

Billable objects are also available by API: Billable Objects API

Counting VMs

For all Cloud resources, quantification is simple. The total by type is displayed within the widget. To see details, click on the appropriate link from the home page (vSphere, VMC, or Public Cloud).
Note that when the link is clicked, the Virtual Machine view is filtered as below:

The Billable Resources Only is toggled on and the relevant cloud(s) are selected.

vSphere CPUs and Cores

When viewing the View Your Billable Objects widget on the Aria Automation home page, the number of billable vSphere CPUs and Cores are displayed. Note that any VM deployed to a cluster will have the entirety of the cluster counted in this portion of the widget.