Just Another IT Blog

It's time to share some of my experiences, crazy ideas, tips and tricks !!!

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vRealize Business for Cloud is a great tool for Cloud cost analysis and price visibility details, more and more as companies mature its operational mode it becomes imperative the ability to control its costs and be transparent with end users.

There are situations where additional charges might need to be applied in order to form a more complete pricing policy, I covered it some time ago using vRealize Automation tags;
Last week I was taking the same approach but using vSphere tags instead, my client does not have vRA yet, but for some reason, the charge has not been applied the VMs.

Let's dig deeper into how did I configure this;
On vSphere, I created a tag Category called  "Aplicação" (it's the Portuguese word for application) and some other tags for specific software licenses, all tied to the "Aplicação" Category.


 The VM has been tagged with the appropriate License tag;



Also, my pricing policy was set up to include an additional charge based on the vSphere tag





To make sure vRB was receiving the inventory information correctly I ran the VM Configuration report;


and indeed vRB was identifying the tag on the VM properly.



Everything was configured correctly !!!

Time for a deeper troubleshoot;
vRB does the collection from vCenter and caches the results on its own internal database for faster operations, while checking the collection logs we found that vRB was messing with the fancy Portuguese letters ("ç" and "ã") and caching a weird word instead, so when comparing the values for the pricing policy, they don't match and so the additional charge was not applied.



The workaround was to create tags without those characters or even special ones. This behavior was found on vRB 7.4, so if your idiom uses fancy characters as well be aware of this.
I do have an issue open with VMware for fixing this bug.

Let me know if you faced it too and what idiom were you using.


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