I know I
own you guys the second part of my Chargeback Design series.
I don’t want this year to come to an end with this pending … let’s wrap it up.
As you
might remember from the first post, you can install Chargeback Manager apart
from Data Collectors!!
But wait,
there’s no VMware Chargeback sizing or architecture guideline out there to help
us decide how to build this solution.
I will share with you how architect your solution with just a few simples questions:
First question: Does it require external access ?
With
external I mean something outside of your control and governance, could be the
internet, a partner’s network, etc.
If yes, then
install the Chargeback Load balancer component only and place the server on
your DMZ.
When you
install a fresh new instance of Chargeback, the load balancer is installed by
default, also it’s the only load balancer solution certified to work with
Chargeback.
The load
balancer will ensure that each instance of Chargeback Manager will serve an
equal number of users.
You might
be wondering, what if my load balancer goes down ?!?!
Well, you lose access to
Chargeback Portal. You can mitigate this risk, enabling VMware’s High
Availability (HA). In case of any outage, HA will bring the Load Balancer
server back in minutes. But, what if I cannot afford an outage of minutes ?!?!
You could still use VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) to protect the Load Balancer server, as long as the VM is a single
vCPU.
Second
question: Does the Chargeback Portal need to be highly available ?
Some
companies don’t need it to be running 99,99999% of the time. They are just concerned about
monthly billing reports or showback reports that can wait until you fix the server ; )
But if your
answer is yes, then you need to install at least 2 instances of Chargeback
Manager, and point then to the same database and Chargeback Load Balancer.
Obs: make
sure you install the same version of Chargeback on all components of the
solution).
Check the Chargeback Installation Guide about how to install those components and what ports need to be opened to the Load Balancer communicates with the Manager.
Some Guidelines:
External Access: Place Load Balancer on DMZ
Need for High Availability: N+1 Chargeback Manager
Amount of Chargeback Manager: 1 for each 50 concurrent users
yeah, yeah, what about Data Collectors sizing ?!?!
We will cover Data Collectors on a third post (that one became to large).
