For Service Providers within the Cloud Provider Program, having adequate metering and billing capabilities is imperative to the critical operations of the service. As a consequence of VMware vCloud Usage Meter (UM) being so integral to a service providers capability to report on the usage and consumption of VMware products, certain scalability limits need to be understood to provide accurate reporting to VMware. The UM operational limits depend on the environment topology and the way it is consumed and the products that are being metered.
Scalability Limits
UM 3.6.x can tolerate 10,000 Virtual Machine’s changing power state every 2.2 hours on an individual virtual machine. If the number of metered virtual machines increases significantly, or the power state changes more frequently, an additional deployment of UM is needed. UM can scale up to 50 vCenter Server Instances, 24,000 Virtual Machines and a 1,000 customers.
Multiple vCloud Usage Meter Deployments
In environments with multiple vCenter Servers and when the scalability limits are consistently being hit or exceeded, it is recommended to deploy multiple UM appliances. In this scenario vCenter becomes the boundary for state changes for UM. The two example diagrams below demonstrate these scenarios:
In this scenario, a single UM appliance is metering four vCenter Servers. If the virtual machines being hosted in this environment are subsequently changing more than 10,000 times ever 2.2 hours, then inconsistent information can be collected by the UM appliance.
In this scenario, multiple UM appliances have been deployed, and the boundary for virtual machine changes have been significantly altered. By splitting the vCenter servers, and registering with different UM appliances, the operational changes can now be metered more accurately.
Note: A single vCenter cannot be registered with multiple UM appliances.
Summary
In conclusion, by adding multiple UM appliances to the service provider environment, the granularity of metered products is significantly increased, resulting in accurate billing information being provided by vCloud Usage Meter.
For further information on vCloud Usage Meter visit: https://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-usage-meter.html
