In VMware Cloud Director (VCD), there are several variants of infrastructure that are service providers can sell to their tenants such as, “Pay as you go”, “Allocation based”, “Reservation based”. The combination of these can be offered to same tenants and it becomes challenging to track usage (“metering”) over a period and charge appropriately. It becomes critical for the cloud service providers as the tenants demand transparency in billing, and the cloud service providers must offer it.

VMware Chargeback is a tool provided by VMware that allows service providers to manage and allocate costs associated with virtualized environments. It helps both providers and tenants understand resource consumption and allocate costs accordingly.

Chargeback has undergone some significant transformations during the last years. Originally, it was known as vRealize Operations Tenant App (TA). This functionality was later incorporated in the new Chargeback solution. Chargeback needed two virtual appliances, namely the VMware Chargeback VA and the vRealize Operations VA.

With Aria Operations version 8.16, Chargeback has been completely integrated into Aria Operations (AOPS). Service providers have the capability to to effortlessly integrate VCD with Chargeback using the AOPS Launchpad. VCD tenant users can access Chargeback capabilities through the VCD portal by utilizing the Operation Manager plugin.

In this post, I’ll show how to setup AOPS integration with VCD, and how to enable VCD tenants to access detailed billing and metering information within their VCD tenant portal.

The whole setup has the following prerequisites:

  • VCD instance up and running
  • AOPS up and running

In this lab, we’re using Aria Operations 8.18 and VMware Cloud Director 10.5.1.1.

The installation and base configuration of VCD and AOPS (formerly vRealize Operations) is described in detail here:

To enable VCD tenants to access detailed metrics and billing information in their VCD portal, the following procedure must be followed:

  1. Configure Aria Operations
  2. Configure VCD

The following diagram depicts the two different launch points for service providers and tenants:

Configure Aria Operations

The integration of VCD and AOPS is provided by the VMware Cloud Director management pack for Aria Operations.

The VCD management pack collects information for Provider vDC, Organization, Organization vDC, vApp, and VM entities from the VCD database and creates the corresponding objects in Aria Operations. It maps the vApps that it imports to virtual machine objects that the vCenter adapter has already imported and creates object relationships between the vApps and the virtual machines. The VCD management pack does not collect performance data from Cloud Director. Instead, it enables Aria Operations to present health data by mapping VCD entities to vCenter Server objects. The vCenter adapter collects performance data for vCenter Server objects.

The first step is to get the AOPS VCD management pack. You can download the PAK file from VMware Marketplace at https://marketplace.cloud.vmware.com/services/details/vmware-aria-operations-management-pack-for-vmware-cloud-director-8-18-2?slug=true.

Next, we install the management pack from the AOPS user interface:

  1. Log in to the Aria Operations user interface with administrator privileges.
  2. In the menu, select Administration and in the left pane select Integrations > Repository.
  3. On the Repository tab, click Add.
  4. In the Add Solution wizard, browse to locate the PAK download folder and select the downloaded PAK file.
  5. Click Upload. The upload might take several minutes.
  6. Read and accept the EULA, and click Next.
  7. When the installation is complete, click Finish.

Now, we must configure a VCD account in AOPS:

  1. In the Aria Operations user interface menu, select Administration and in the left pane select Integrations > Accounts.
  2. On the Accounts tab, click Add Account.
  3. Provide the following data:
    • Name: e.g. vcd1a.lab.local
    • VMware Cloud Director Host: e.g. vcd1a.lab.local
    • Credential: use a VCD system account
    • Collector/Group: e.g. Default collector group
    • Click VALIDATE CONNECTION to initiate the authentication request to the CSP authentication service.
  4. Click ADD.

You can review the VCD integration:

As a last step in AOPS, we are going to configure Chargeback:

  1. In the Aria Operations user interface menu, select Administration and in the left pane select Chargeback.
  2. To activate or deactivate metrics a tenant should be able to access in VCD, select Manage Metrics.
  3. Select the Object Type, the expand a metric.
  4. Select the object you want to activate and select “Activated” in the state column.
  5. Click SAVE.
  6. The enable the page access for your VCD tenants, select the Manage Pages section.
  7. Toggle the setting for all allowed pages.
  8. Click SAVE.

Configure VMware Cloud Director

The integration of AOPS on the VCD side is provided by the Aria Operations plugin. VCD plug-ins expand the functions of the Service provider admin portal and the VMware Cloud Director tenant portal. The AOPS plugin is already installed as a part of VCD.

To enable our VCD organizations to use the AOPS plugin, follow these steps:

  1. Login to the VCD service provider portal.
  2. From the top navigation bar, select More > Customize Portal.
  3. Select the check box next to the Aria Operations plugin, and click Enable.

Next, we must publish the AOPS plugin to our tenant organizations:

  1. Select the check box next to the Aria Operations plugin, and click Publish.
  2. Select the scope for this plug-in.
    • Tenants: select all the organizations to which you want to publish this plug-in.
  3. Click Save.

Tenant operations

Finally, we can check the operations view from a VCD tenant perspective.

  1. Login to the VCD tenant portal as a tenant user of a organization to which the AOPS plugin has been published.
  2. From the top navigation bar, select More > Operations Manager.

Here you can see the homepage of the tenant’s Launchpad, which looks very similar to the AOPS launchpad. From there, a tenant is able to access the various pages, metrics, as well as bills and reports, which we’ve enabled in AOPS before.

That’s all for now.