VMware has just released the vRealize Operations Manager Tenant App 2.4 on 14/04/2020, based on the release notes, it introduces the following new features:

  • Pricing Flexibility:
    • One time fixed costs for setup fee and incidental charges
    • 95th percentile billing for network bandwidth
    • Sizing-profile based billing
    • Tag-based rate factors to apply selective discounts or premiums to virtual machines
    • Tag-based pricing policies to create exception charging policies for selected virtual machines
    • Slab-based pricing to charge different rates based on resources consumed by virtual machines and edges
  • Metering Enhancements
    • The Management Pack for vCloud Director links edge device to an NSX-V edge device in vRealize Operations Manager enabling the advanced network metric metering
  • Product Enhancements
    • Bill scheduling
    • Enhanced control on tenant views for provider
    • Improved user interface
    • Introduction of Telemetry to improve the product by collecting anonymous usage details (Optional)

Today I’m going to walk you through some of these new features by actually login into the real product in my lab to have a more understanding about what are those look like (thanks to my team’s generosity again, the lab is my team’s effort to bring it up).

Before we check those out, if you want to test against the new release, please make sure you meet all the requirements by checking VMware product interoperability metrics.

matrix3

The following architecture provides an overview of integration of Tenant App with vCenter, vCloud Director, and NSX Management Packs.

architecture

Let’s examine those above mentioned new features one by one now:

One time fixed costs for setup fee and incidental charges

This section used to charge for One time incidental charges on Virtual machines, such as creation/Setup charges, or charges for one off incidents like installation of a patch. These costs do not repeat on a recurring basis. You can add many one time fixed cost items here.

 

f1

95th percentile billing for network bandwidth & Slab-based pricing

Usually service provider will offer this flexible charge model for their customers especially dealing with networking related metering items, now you can see the Tenant App can support this model:

95

After you added the SLAB item, system will give you the explanation automatically just in case we don’t miss the definition here, i.e:

–> “If usage is 1000 MBps and Above, then Base Rate 2 will be applied for whole usage”

Sizing-profile based billing

If you have defined the VM Sizing policies in vCloud Director, now you can just leverage those sizing policies to create your pricing policy based on that.

P1

Select your VM Sizing Policy defined in vCD:

sizing policy 3

Tag-based pricing policies

This section is used to charge for Any additional charges to be applied on the VMs based on their discovered Tags from vCenter or vCloud Director. (Typical examples are Antivirus=true, SpecialSupport=true etc)

vc tag

Same with the vCD side:

desert

Tag-based rate factors

Rate factors are used to either bump up or discount the prices either against individual resources consumed by the Virtual Machines, or whole charges against the Virtual Machine. Some examples are:

  1. Increase CPU rate by 20% (Factor 1.2) for all VMs tagged with CPUOptimized=true
  2. Discount overall charge on VM by 50% (Factor 0.5) for all Vms tagged with PromotionalVM=True

Rate Factors 1

Bill scheduling

To schedule a bill, enable the Schedule bill option and specify the details to generate the bill on the required date. You need to do this while generating the bill rule.

Bill 1

After that bill policy has been created, we can view this bill info as as system or organization administrator:

View Bill

Enhanced control on tenant views for provider

What if we have already got our OSS/BSS system/mechanism doing the billing job in the backend and we don’t like to expose the “Bills” item to our tenants in the vCD GUI?

Nice thing is that we  can actually hide that item by using the “Manage Pages” in the “Access Management” section.

Restrict1

Also if we want to restrict some too complicated metric items showing up in the GUI, we can avoid that complexity by selecting which collection metrics our tenants can actually see; this is useful because sometimes the information is just too much for customers to understand what it really mean.

Restrict 2

API

The other thing is that you can use a web browser to communicate with the vRealize Operations Tenant App analytics engine, either through the product user interface or through API calls to perform queries on the Tenant App data repository and load it into a separate analytics system.

For information on individual APIs, open the tenant app api documentation url in the format: https://tenantapp.example.com/tenant-app-api/swagger-ui.html

API

Hope this blog help you right away regarding what the new tenant app 2.4 is all about, thanks!

Notes: