The latest version of Virtualization Manager (VMAN) 2020.2.1 is now available in your customer portal.
This is a fully tested and supported version of the product and you can upgrade current production servers, while retaining your complete configuration and history.
If you're looking for release notes and other supporting documentation, please click the links below:
VMAN 2020.2.1 release notes
VMAN 2020.2.1 system requirements
Orion Platform 2020.2.1 release notes
Orion Platform 2020.2.1 release summary
What's new?
Chargeback
This feature began it's life on the legacy VMAN appliance. Customers have frequently requested that it be ported over to Orion based VMAN and now it's here! The basic idea of chargeback is very simple. Assign a cost to a metric being gathered and then apply that cost over a given time frame. There are many reasons a virtual admin may want to do this, such as:
This first version of chargeback in VMAN on Orion is almost an exact copy of the feature as it existed on the appliance so if you used the feature previously it should be very familiar to you. There are some screenshots below to visually guide you through the process but it is pretty simple to do. Give the report a name and a description first. Next decide if you want to summarize by host or cluster. Then choose one of the pre-defined time frames that you want to use for calculation. Then enter in your cost for each of the respective resources (keep in mind that CPU, Memory and Storage cost will be based on average usage and vCPU is a per unit configured cost) and finally click "Create".
Once you have a report created it should be listed in the report inventory. You can either download or delete a specific report or you can also multi-select reports as well. In the current release the reports are downloaded directly to your browser / PC in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
Navigate to the Chargeback Page
Create a chargeback report
List of chargeback reports
A finished chargeback report
Your Feedback Counts!
I'm incredibly interested in your feedback! Your feedback shapes our products. Post your thoughts, questions and concerns into the VMAN forum and the VMAN team will be watching for input to make the product better and better. In addition, if you come up with a brand new feature idea that we should consider for a future version, the best place to capture those ideas would be VMAN Feature Requests and as you can see from our What We’re Working on for VMAN page, we take those inputs very seriously.
Are there plans to add functionality to compare costs of running a VM on premises versus Azure or AWS rates? My manager has asked us to put this together. Also can you restrict the charge back calculations to certain VMs, for example by VM type or string in the VM name?
@johnny_ringo We are looking at cost calculators and comparisons for potential future versions. Right now the only summary option is by host or cluster. However we are currently working on some additional summary and restriction options. I may ping you directly for some more specific input on that subject!
Absolutely will! Our biggest desire is being able to compare costs of running specific sets of machines on our own infrastructure versus AWS or Azure...
Is vSphere 7.0U1 supported?
It would be nice to be able to also get custom properties on the virtual servers in the report. That way we can easy split the cost on different systems/owners/customers.
@bmoline There should be no problems running VMAN against that version. Are you seeing specific problems of some sort?
@Seashore One of the items we are currently working on for a potential future release is additional filtering for the report which includes custom properties.
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