The introduction of Usage Meter 3.6 brings significant new features that give VMware vCloud Provider Program partners the advantages of granular metering (including additional products) and NSX and vRealize Operations monetization. With Usage Meter 3.6, Service Providers can increase revenue from higher-end services without cost risk by limiting adoption to only the end customers demanding these services.
Instead of having to adopt a solution across your entire infrastructure, vCloud Usage Meter 3.6 enable you to adopt products on a per-customer basis based upon specific customer requirements. That gives you the flexibility to meet all your customer needs without deploying products to all your customers – from providing basic services for some, to meeting the advanced networking, added security and management needs of others. It also gives you the ability to Increase your revenue by offering higher-end services, such as NSX and vRealize Operations, at your pace, based upon end-customer demand. Best of all, there’s no cost risk because adoption is limited to only the end customers demanding those services.
Usage Meter 3.6 provides three core capabilities that give Service Providers greater operational efficiency, increased monetization of services, and platform/product improvement.
Operational Efficiency
Now Service Providers can access archived usage reports when upgrading from Usage Meter 3.5 to Usage Meter 3.6, with the option to upgrade during your regularly scheduled maintenance period. Migration to Usage Meter 3.6 is designed to fit into the existing maintenance window, and prior monthly reports from Usage Meter 3.5 are archived and can be easily accessed for reference.
Monetization of Services
Prior to Usage Meter 3.6, NSX metering was rigid and required Service Providers to declare which edition should be used per VC. With Mixed-Edition NSX usage in Usage Meter 3.6, you no longer need to use the drop-down to select which edition is applicable because Usage Meter 3.6 detects the edition automatically. You can also use different editions of NSX in the same VC and be billed accordingly. For example, one VM might be using Base, another using Advanced, a third using Enterprise, and some VMs might not be using NSX functionality at all. Other service monetization benefits of Usage Meter 3. 6 include:
- Bundled and standalone NSX usage can be reported on a per-customer basis, or, in the case of multiple-edition usage, standalone reporting occurs per edition. There’s no change when it comes to creating customers or rules, which means you can map VMs, resource pools, folders, and more to customers—and provide much more accurate end-user reporting.
- Granular metering of NSX lets you easily monetize services like NSX and vRealize Operations by offering them based on end-customer demand. With Usage Meter 3.6, metering is done at the VM level, which means you pay based on each individual end customer’s actual consumption. Usage Meter 3.6 automatically detects editions based on features available at a per-VM granularity, allowing you to grow and pay for usage based on end-customer demand. This enables Service Providers to offer NSX—a higher-end product that can generate significant revenue—without depleting your own funds in the process.
- Gain transparency and control over the cost and quality of IT services at your location and in your customers’ environments with vRealize Operations Reporting. Usage Meter 3.6 provides the added functionality to meter vRealize Operations managing VMs hosted by the Service Provider and those hosted on end customers’ premises. This means that vRealize Operations can be configured with multiple VMware vCenter Server® instances.
Platform/Product Improvement
With Usage Meter 3.6 and the ability to meter vCloud Availability, Service Providers can deliver true DR that’s easy to operate, primed for end-customer adoption, and inherently integrated with the VMware cloud ecosystem. And with the ability to meter VMware vSAN™ Add-On, Service Providers can also deploy enterprise-class, high-performance application storage optimized for any virtualization workload.
Service Providers running a version of Usage Meter prior to 3.5 will be out of compliance, as vCloud Usage Meter 3.5 and 3.6 are the only supported versions of the product. To make upgrading even easier, the VMware Cloud Provider Program is now offering a White Glove Service to assist partners in upgrading to Usage Meter 3.6. The VMware Cloud Provider Program requires that partners use the latest generally available (GA) version of vCloud Usage Meter.
You can learn more in the vCloud Usage Meter Product Detection White Paper, which details the processes used by Usage Meter to detect individual metered products and report their feature usage. It provides Service Providers with insight into how points are allocated by product and feature, as well as configuration recommendations to ensure deployed virtual machines are metered as expected.
Get up to date on Usage Meter 3.6 and start growing your business today by taking advantage of the White Glove Service. If you’re using a version of Usage Meter prior to 3.5 email vcan_um_mgmt@vmware.com.
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