Overview

There are several new features comes with the new released of “vRealize Operations Manager Tenant App for vCloud Director 2.0”, the most important improvement is it provides cloud providers the ability to create pricing policy based on chargeback strategy for their customers/tenants.

Chargeback is now integrated natively in vCloud Director, powered by vRealize Operations, it provides the following capabilities for VMware cloud providers who use vCloud Director as the multi-tenant public cloud platform:

  1. Define Pricing Policies unique to each tenant or globally
  2. Map Pricing Policies to resources to allow customized pricing per tenant
  3. Generate Bills based on usage and pricing policy
  4. View Bills for all tenants and allow tenants to see their own bills

Detailed billing data for each tenant:

  • Every tenant/customer of service provider can review their bills using the vCD tenant app interface.
  • Service Provider administrator can generate bills for a tenant by selecting a specific resource and a pricing policy that must be applied for a defined period and can also log in to review the bill details.

What tenant can view in the console:

capability

P.S: Reports are only available for service provider, tenant can’t see the Report tab in this version.

Required Components for Tenant App for vCloud Director 2.0 to function correctly:

  1. vRealize Operations 7.0
  2. Management Pack for vCloudDirector 5.0
  3. NSX Management Pack 3.5.2
  4. AMQP host related information configured in vCloud Director extensibility (for Plug-in)

Install vRealize Operations Manager 7.0

According to VMware’s best practices, you choose the right size of vRealize Operations appliance to fit your environment’s need:
vROPS

Configure vCloud Director Plug-in

You can log in to the tenant app through the vCloud Director user interface through vRealize Operations Manager Tenant App for vCloud Director as a plug-in, this feature provides easy accessibility without having to access the tenant app in a separate browser with no change in the functionality of the tenant app.

You configure this through vCloud Director extensibility settings, from user guide for service provider, you need to specify the value for the followings parameters:

AMQP2

After you have successfully deployed the Tenant App appliance, You can login to Tenant App Admin portal to configure the vCloud Director Plug-in:

  1. On the left pane, click Administration > Support.
  2. Click Configure with VCD Tenant UI.

support

Input your AMQP host related information in the popup windows, here you can refer to your vCloud Director’s extensibility settings:

AMQP mapping

Check the newly configured solution is running, don’t click the red square icon to try to stop the service, it will delete the configuration!

AMQP4

Make sure you have enabled the Plugin Access for your tenant in the Access Management tab.

AM1

 

Check to see if you can see the newly created “Operations Manager” item in the vCloud Director’s HTML5 topdown select menu:

 

UI Plugin

 

Billings in Tenant App

Service provider side setup

first you need to choose the correct currency in vRealize Operations Manager.

currency

 Configure Pricing Policy

  1. On the left pane, click Metering > Configuration tab.
  2. Select the Pricing Policies > Add New Policy.

b1

Follow the steps required to create the Pricing Policy, you can create multiple pricing policy based on your actual needs, first we create a Pricing Policy named “T1-VPC”.

b2

Next we will setup the CPU Rate charing policy, you can see we can select different type of charging policy for GHz/vCPU Count, time period, allocation model and fixed cost, same setting idea for Memory Rate.

c1

c2

For Storage Rate, you can setup the policy for “Default Rate” or to use “Storage Policy”.

S1

s2

For Network Rate, you setup the following items, Tenant App will leverage NSX management pack to retrieve these networking usage information.

n1

Now you can configure the “Advanced Network Rate” for the following items:

  • Distributed Firewall
  • Edge Services
    • HA
    • DHCP
    • IP
    • IPv6
    • IPSec
    • Load Balancer
    • NAT
    • SSL VPN
    • L2 VPN
    • Firewall
    • Static Routing
    • BGP Routing
    • OSPF Routing
  • Edge Gateway Size

a1a2a3a4

You can charge base on the size of the provisioned Edge Gateway.

a5

 

Also you can setup if you like to charge based on the Guest OS name.

g1

After you have configured whatever items you’ll like to include in the billing report, you will see the newly created pricing policy showing up in the table.

pp1

 

Assign the policy to the selected Organization VDCs

Next step is to assign the newly created pricing policy to specific Organization VDC, so each Organization VDC can have its own different charging model.

From the list of Organization VDCs, select an Org VDCs and click “Assign”.

asign pp

assign 2

You can see the assigned policy name under the selected organization VDC

assign 3

 

 

Generate a New Bill

You have associate the pricing policy to Organization VDC, now it’s time to generate the billing report.

  1. On the left pane, click Metering > Bills.
  2. Click GENERATE NEW BILL.

 

generate 1

 

Follow the wizard to generate the bill, first select which OVDC you want to generate the bill.

ge1

Next you have the chance to select which policy you’d like to apply with this OVDC.

ge2

Then select what time range this report will cover, also give it a name and click Finish.

ge3

A new bill will be shown up in the table.

ge4

 

You can then click the “view” icon to check the bill, sample metering report is shown as below.

ge5

Tenant Side

From the vRealize Operations Manager Tenant app for vCloud Director home page, navigate to Metering > Bills. Under My Bills, select one of the bills from the list of bills, and click View.

UI Plugin

Tenant can see Tenant App GUI from within vCloud Director’s console.

 

vcd1

Tenant can check their billing report (metering info, probably not really what service provider’s actual billing report for their tenant).

ts1

Same result as what is mentioned earlier in service provider’s portal.

ts2

 

Tenant App APIs

Tenant App APIs is available for automation by using Swagger, Swagger documentation is available at https://<Tenant App IP>/tenant-app-api/swagger-ui.html

API1

Reports

There are total 15 reports available for service providers to run and schedule report generation based on their needs, You can download a report in a PDF or CSV format.

report 1

report 2

 

Notes: