Recently I’ve been working on a vRealize Business for Cloud project where the client asked if it was possible to add specific software costs to specific VMs, not all of them.
Before digging up let’s make things clear, vRB has 2 distinct areas, Expenses and Pricing.
Expenses: are costs evolved in maintaining your operations, like hardware purchase, licenses, power and cooling, labor, etc.
In general, this section focus for Infrastructure Admins and management, showing how much it costs to maintain the operation running.
Pricing: on the other hand, focus on showing to the end user how much a specific VM will cost to them or to his business unit.
I’m not here to discuss a business case, but different companies might have different goals, such that one company can decide to just cover his expenses while others can decide to have profit with his operations, so depending on its goal the pricing policy might look different.
Back to my client, his goal was to show to his end user, during request time through vRealize Automation, how much cost a database (SQL or Oracle).
The solution we gave to them was through the use of vRA’s custom properties.
Let’s see how it works:
- Create a vRA‘s custom property, mine was called vRB.software
- Add the custom property to the blueprint on the VM component where the software is installed, on the Value column, type the software identification
- Edit the pricing policy where this cost will be applied
- Near the additional service click “Edit”
- Add the custom property (in my case vRB.software) to the identification field, on the tag column the value that matches what you specified on the Blueprint, finally the cost of it (on my screen are just silly values, OK).
Repeat it for each software you want to price.
vRB will just show custom properties for the VM's that have been already provisioned, so, if you don't see your property on the dropdown list, make sure you provision a blueprint which has the property you want, also allow vRB to run an inventory collection (making sure your VM will be listed on vRB's reports)
As you can see, now the cost of the software is included in the VM’s price.
If you want, you can click on “View cost details” to understand how the price is composed.
Under the additional costs, you will see the cost of the software we just added to our pricing policy, in this case, 2.000 for Oracle.
It was not the first time I have been asked this, so it would make sense to post it here in case anyone else is looking for such solution.
