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.
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