Ok, it’s
time to give you the final piece of architecting Chargeback solutions:
Chargeback Data Collectors.
We already
covered Part 1 and Part 2 of this design series, if you missed it, please, go
back and check them before proceed.
Deciding
how many Data Collectors you will deploy on your environment will depends on
the number of vCenters, vClouds, number of VMs and Hierarchies you need to
monitor.
There’s no formal
information about it, everything is based on field experiences at this point, but
the Using VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager with VMware vCloud Director tech
note gives us some maximum configuration of Chargeback.
Again, what
I’m providing here is my advise on how to set up a solution like that, use this
information wisely.
First
question is about resilience.
If your
data collector is down for a long time, due to the database rollup data jobs,
it will, probably, miss some data. That means you will have no data about the
outage period to charge them.
Advise 1: If
you cannot afford to miss any data, remember ALWAYS to deploy 2 of them.
Now, if you
run a small environment, let’s say up to 2 vCenters and less than 2000 VMs. (no
matter how many vClouds systems);
Advise 2: install
all Data Collectors on the same system.
Environments
bigger than that;
Advise 3: have
a data collector only for vCenter and another one only for vCloud.
Advise 4:
as a best practice, I always install vShield Data Collector on the same box as
vCloud Data Collector.
Environments
with more than 5 vCenters;
Advise 5: use
3 Data Collectors, because on the event of one failing the others would be
capable of handling all the data.
Don’t
forget, a maximum of 10 vCenter servers per Chargeback system, more than that
you need to create another Chargeback System environment.
But how the
Data Collector behave when there are more than one collector?
When
there’s more than one vCenter Data Collector, they are all active and they load
balance the tasks between them automatically, in case of a failure the remaining
ones will assume the tasks of the failed one.
vCloud Data
Collectors on the other hand, when there’s more than one, they will act in an
active/passive fashion…the active is collecting all the data until it fails, by
then the passive turns into active and restart the collection again.
Which leads
us to the final advise,
Advise 6: don’t install more than 2 vCloud Data
Collectors, since there’s no load
balance between them and just one will be collecting the data at any time, there’s not point on have more than 2.
vShield
Data Collector acts the same as vCloud Data Collectors.
See you
next guys….
