VM instance model in VMware vCenter ChargeBack up to version 2.0.1 still has no prorating on charges. For those of you who is not sure what I am describing by VM Instance below how its described in the “VMware-Technote-Using-vCenter-Chargeback-vCloud-Director” document as well a screenshot of where you configure VM instance in vCenter ChargeBack:

“VM Instance enables the creation of a matrix of fixed costs that apply to hard a hard bundle of vCPU (count) and memory (MB). VM Instance matrices are linked with a cost model and consist of the hierarchy selection criteria, a fixed-cost table and a default fixed cost. Selection criteria can be based on name-pattern matching or … Read More

Since the introduction of vCenter ChargeBack integration with VMware vCloud Director & I hear repeatedly questions about how its Cost Models charge in a VMware vCD environment. To be honest, the question usually come in the form that vCenter ChargeBack is not calculating the cost as I expected & something wrong with it. Most of the time it turn out nothing but a misunderstanding of vCenter ChargeBack Cost Models in a vCloud Director environment.  As vCenter ChargeBack Cost Models highly integrate with VMware vCloud Director allocation models, its very important to have a solid understanding of VMware vCD Allocation Models. As Duncan Epping & Chris Colotti both has explained vCloud … Read More

It seems the problem of vCenter ChargeBack report not displaying certain info is becoming a popular question lately. Actually this was pointed out to me earlier today by a colleague who was reviewing my vCD design. The most common info not displayed in a vCenter ChargeBack Report are below:

• vCenter ChargeBack Report Does Not Display the Network Transmitted and Network Received Information

• vCenter ChargeBack Report Does Not Display the Disk Read and Disk Write Information

• vCenter ChargeBack Report Does Not Display the Memory Usage Value and the Corresponding Cost

It seems many admins are getting to the point where one of the above list is not being displayed in the … Read More

I was about to head to bed till I saw this really funny VMware video on my facebook. I thought it was too funny to pass by it and not share it with my readers. Check out how the Cavemen want efficiency too! Move beyond traditional IT management solutions with VMware. Don’t miss this video and watch it and have a great laugh.

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VMware vCenter ChargeBack was released on Nov 30, 2011. It has quite few awaited enhancement and a bit of interface polishing. For those of you who did not hear of VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager or does not know why its required, I will brief you a bit before going into the details of the new releases. If you have been in the virtualization field for a while, then for sure you have heard of the VMs Sprawl(A large amount of virtual machines on your network without the proper IT management or control)  or Zombie VMs(VMs that are using resources but their role is no longer required).  For more info about … Read More

As lately I have been testing several of our Enterprise Management Solutions, & I have been sharing them more often with our customers. After the announcement of vRAM, vCenter CapacityIQ is one of the products that seems to grab attention quickly. After delivering several POCs to customers, most of them have came back to me and asked me on the procedure to Grant a User Access to vCenter CapacityIQ. Most of them want to ensure that they can create a user name & password for their monitoring team that does not have access to anything else in vCenter. As the steps are not too clear in our documentation, I have … Read More

Capacity Management importance has been on the rise since Virtualization started becoming a main stream. In earlier days in the physical world, Capacity Planning/Management used to end at the time the hardware was purchased. In most cases, the hardware was over-sized to ensure it can handle the workload as well future growth of the application. Though as that over-sized box is dedicated to a single application, it did not matter how you sized that application as long the server has enough resources to run it. Though when virtualizing the story is fundamentally different, as now you have multiple VMs per server. If VMs are over-sized that means your consolidation ratio & other … Read More

Most organization today has different complains about their current performance monitoring tools. These problems are put under the magnifier when Virtualization or Private Cloud is implemented. Below are few of the main complains getting heard & VMware is trying to respond to by vCenter Operations Manager:

• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools report too many metrics that is hard to make sense of & track.
• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools report too many false positive events, which getting to be a nightmare for our admins.
• Our users are the first to notice performance problem before our admins can use our current Performance Management/Monitoring tools trying to find out the problem source.
• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools

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