Last week one of my colleagues had to upgrade an evaluation version of MS SQL 2008 R2 to a fully licensed version. After downloading and mounting the .ISO file, the setup was started. At some point you are asked to enter the product key. However the product key was not available at the MS download site. The good news is that the key is part of the .ISO file.

Go to the x64 and open the file DefaultSetup.ini. The line that starts with “PID=”, contains the product key.

Source for this post.

See also my post on upgrading MS SQL 2008 R2 Express edition to a Standard Edition.

Thanks for reading.

During my preparations, I have followed the official Exam Blue print, the notes are based on this document. The information comes from the official VMware documentation, references to blog posts and lots of screen shots from my Home lab.

The notes do not cover each objective in every aspect (that’s why I named it Study Notes instead of a Study Guide). However, I am sure it provides a lot of useful information.

Without a doubt, the best way to prepare for this exam is to download and install the bytes. Then build and break vCloud Director, vCenter Chargeback Manager and the other stuff.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Link: VCP Cloud Study Notes 20130406

So, it was time to see how to restore the missing Edge gateway.

The first idea was to see if the Re-deply option could solve the issue.

Figure 1 – vCloud Director Edge gateway

So, login to vCloud Director, select the Edge gateway and select Re-deploy from the available actions. Unfortunately, the result was negative. The task detail explains why, re-deploy is meant to publish the configuration to an Edge gateway, but communication with the Edge gateway is essential.

Figure 2

First part of the solution is, to login to the “VMware vShield Manager”.

• Under “View”, select Edges;
• In the left pane, select “Edge Gateways” and in the right pane, select the faulty edge gateway.
• Under “Actions”, you will also find “Redeploy Edge”, but that won’t help you.
• Instead, select “Manage”.

Figure 3 – Edges, Edge gateways

• The detail window opens, select Settings. At the bottom, under “Edge Appliances”, select the only available Edge Appliance and choose the “Delete” option (red cross).

Figure 4

• Now, choose “Add”, to recreate the Edge gateway
• Fill in the required information, and choose “Add”.
  The “Cluster/Resource Pool” is usually a System vDC resource pool. Select a Datastore, Host and Folder for placement.

Figure 5

• If everything goes well, you can follow the progress in the vCenter server, the Edge gateway will be deployed.
• Switch back to vCloud Director, select the Edge gateway and choose Re-Deploy. This time the Edge gateway will be configured and report Status OK.

That is all. I thank you for reading and as always, I welcome your comments.

This VM is ideal for testing purposes. For instance you are building environments based on nested ESXi hosts and you want a small VM for testing HA, network connectivity and so on.

In my case, there was only one small problem. Since vSphere 5.1, my hardware does not support running 64 bit VMs on nested ESXi hosts.

The resolution is easy, in fact this version of Tiny Core Linux is 32-bit. So after importing the .OVA, just edit the configuration. On the Options tab, change the Guest OS from “Other Linux (64-bit)” to “Other Linux (32-bit)”. That’s all.

Figure 1

Credits for the people at the Tiny Core Linux project and Iwan Rahabok for creating the .OVA. You can find it here.

I suppose you have installed and configured vCCM without any problems? Did you add a vCenter server and the vCenter Chargeback Manager Data Collector is running? Fine.

By the way, these posts come from my study notes while preparing for my VCP5-IaaS certification and cover at least parts of Objective 1.1 – Install vCloud Components and Section 3 – Configure and Administer vCenter Chargeback.

A word about vCenter Chargeback Manager Users, roles and permissions.
After the installation of vCCM has finished, there is only one user, in my case I named the account “admin”. This first user has the role of Super User.  This role has all the privileges. vCCM provides a mechanism called resource-based authorization. As such vCCM works with; Resource types, Users and Groups, Roles and Permissions.
For the sake of simplicity, I will continue to work with my “admin” account.

Figure 1 – Users

Before you can really create your first report, you have to follow a few more steps. I suppose, vCCM is installed and basic configuration has been finished. This also includes adding at least one vCenter Server.

Another remark, vCCM is a rather complex product with a lot of features. To get a good understanding, I will start with the basic elements. As soon as the fundamentals are clear, it is easier to add more features to it.

Necessary steps to create your first report:

• Create a Chargeback Hierarchy
• Create a Pricing Model
• Create Fixed Costs (optional)
• Create Report

Create a Chargeback Hierarchy

A chargeback hierarchy is an organization of vCenter Server entities and vCenter Chargeback Manager Entities.

• The vCenter Server entities include virtual machines, ESX Server hosts, data centers, resource pools, host folders, and virtual machine folders.
• The vCenter Chargeback Manager entities are custom entities that could represent a logical parent for the vCenter Server entities. For example, the vCenter Chargeback Manager entities could represent the departments, cost centers, or business units in an organization.

A vCenter Chargeback Manager entity can contain one or more vCenter Server entities and vCenter Chargeback Manager Entities.

You create a new hierarchy from the tab “Manage Hierarchy”. After pushing the button, you will be presented with three options:

• Create a custom hierarchy
• Create a hierarchy and synchronize with a vCenter Hierarchy
• Import a hierarchy from a .csv file

Figure 2 – Create a Hierarchy

We select the first option, “Custom Hierarchy”

Figure 3 – Custom hierarchy

After you have created a hierarchy, you can start populating the hierarchy.

Figure 4

You will usually start by adding a vCenter Chargeback Manager Entity. Right-click on the hierarchy and choose “New Chargeback Folder” from the menu. Now choose “New vCenter Server Entity” and start populating the hierarchy.

Figure 5

You can choose from the familiar “Hosts & Clusters” or “VMs and templates” view. You can use highlighting under filters, to make life easier.

Figure 6

After re-selecting the Hierarchy, the vCenter disappears.

If you have created custom attributes under : Settings, Manage Attributes, you can assign values to your custom attributes. In this example, we have created an attribute called Geo_location.

Figure 7

Right click VM and select Manage Attributes.

Figure 8 – Manage Attributes

What is “Allocation Units”?

Before we step into Pricing Models, in Figure 7 we also see the option “Set allocation Units”. This is an important concept.

At some point we need to the calculate costs for an entity. You can set the allocation units, when you want to charge an entity (VM) for a fixed amount of computing resource units, immaterial of the actual resource usage.

Note: The allocation of computing resource units is performed in vCenter Chargeback Manager (and has no relation with the vCenter Server!).

Figure 9 – Set Allocation Units

Now you can set values for the computing resources that make a VM. You can enter new values effective from now on, or set for a specific period. Example for a selected VM, we could allocate 2GHz CPU and 4 GB Memory. So as long as we do not change this, the VM will be charged with these fixed units, independent from the actual usage.

I this example, we will NOT use the allocation Units and go for an actual usage model.

Create a Pricing Model

You must know about the vCenter Chargeback Manager cost-related elements to effectively create and configure a pricing model. All these elements are related to each other, but after reading this part, it becomes clearer. vCenter Chargeback Manager includes the following cost related elements.

• Chargeable computing resource
• Base rate
• Fixed cost
• Billing policy
• Pricing model
• Rate factor
• Cost template

A pricing model defines base rates for the chargeable computing resources, the currency, the billing policy to be used for calculating the total cost, and other costs.

A chargeable computing resource is any computing resource that must be accounted for when calculating the IT operational costs. The usage of the computing resources is measured and the corresponding charge is calculated. vCenter Chargeback Manager accounts for the following computing resources:

• CPU, The CPU usage is measured in GHz.
• Disk Read and Write, The usage is measured in GB/hour.
• Memory, The memory usage is measured in GB.
• Storage, The usage is measured in GB.
• And many more

The Base rate is a global rate that you want to charge for a unit of chargeable computing resource for a specific duration.

Figure 10 Pricing Model, Base rates

In this property of a Pricing Model, you will see the elements that make base rates. The Computing Resource CPU is measured in GHz Units on an Hourly basis (specific duration). In this example, the actual base rate is 1 USD/GHz computed hourly (Expensive, but this is just an example…).
Base rates are provided by you.

vCCM comes out-of-the-box with a set of default pricing models. These Pricing Models do not define any base rates or fixed costs. So, you must modify these pricing models and set the required base rates and fixed costs before using them for generating reports.

vCCM provides a tool that can help you calculating your Base Rates, that is the Base Rate calculator.

Figure 11 base rate calculator

This tool is useful, but in my case, I have stumbled on a bug while calculating “Other costs”. Other Costs that extend 1.000 units are not calculated.

Figure 12 – Billing policies

The next element is “Billing Policy”.

A billing policy defines an expression that is used for identifying the amount of computing resources units to be considered for calculating the costs. Therefore, a billing policy must account for all the computing resources. vCCM comes with a number of predefined billing policies, you can also create new billing policies.

The billing policy contains an expression for each resource. The expression includes an attribute value that identifies the computing resource units to be considered for cost calculation. The attribute values can be allocation, reservation, size, and usage. Examples are:

Example, “CPU Reservation” means that CPU costs will be calculated based on the Reservation. All other chargeable computer resources (“other resources”) will be calculated on the actual usage.

The amount of computing resource to be accounted for depends on the attributes defined in the billing policy expression.
The attributes used by vCenter Chargeback Manager are as follows:

• Usage, The actual utilization of the resource by the virtual machine
• Reservation, The amount of resource reserved for the virtual machine. This reservation is configured in vCenter Server.
• Allocation, The amount of resource allocated for the virtual machine. This is a user-defined allocation and is configured in vCenter Chargeback Manager (has been discussed before).
• Size, This attribute can be used only for memory. The memory size is fetched from the vCenter Server and replicated in the vCenter Chargeback Manager
• burstable utilization, This attribute lets you account for the 95th percentile of actual utilization. This attribute is available only for the external network transmit rate and external network receive rate computing resources.

Note: Attributes will be used for different resources. Example, attribute Usage will be used for Resources like cpu, memory and storage.
Note: The attribute value reservation is available only for CPU and memory. The attribute value size is available only for memory.

Figure 13 – Pricing Model, Billing Policy

In the Pricing Model in Figure 13, the Billing Policy has been set to: Fixed Cost and Actual Usage.

The final part of the Pricing Model is the “Other Costs” section.

Figure 14 – Pricing Model, Other Costs

In this section, you can set costs for vServices like HA, FT and costs for guest operating systems.

We will now create a new pricing model, named: Pricing Models Virtual Labs.

Figure 15

We select the pre-defined billing policy “Actual Usage”.

Figure 16

Figure 17

Provide Base rates for the following resources: CPU, Memory and Storage.

Figure 18

Figure 19

We will not use the Other Costs section.

Cost Templates, Rate factors and Fixed costs

At this point, we only have to discuss; Cost Templates, Rate factors and Fixed costs. BTW, we are not going to use this in our example.

You can create the fixed costs that you want to charge on the entities and hierarchies. These costs can include periodically charged costs and one-time costs. When defining fixed costs, you can specify whether the cost must be prorated. Prorated fixed costs are considered only for the time for which they are applied on the entity.

A Rate factor is the multiplication factor to be used along with the base rate to calculate the charge for a unit of chargeable computing resource used or allocated for a specified duration. Rate factors are useful when you want to charge the entities in a hierarchy differently. The rate factors enable you to apply a cost that is a multiple or a fraction of the base rate. The rate factor value can be between 0 and 999.99. The precision is up to two decimal places.

Entity-specific cost configuration, such as the rate factors and fixed costs, must be defined on the entity. If you want to apply a standard entity-specific cost setting on more than one entity, you can create a cost template that contains these settings, and apply the same to the required entities. So, Cost templates are provided to make life easier. Cost templates allow you to store Rate factors and Fixed Costs.

When you create a new Cost Template, you must select a currency. You cannot change the currency later on.

Figure 20 – Cost template, rate factors and fixed costs

Figure 21 – Cost template, overview

Create a report

Basically, there are four types of reports:

• Cost report
  A cost report provides the cost and utilization information for each computing resource for the hierarchy or entity.
• Usage report
  A usage report is similar to a cost report except that it provides only the computing resource utilization data.
• Cost comparison report
  A cost comparison report enables you to compare the costs for each resource and entity based on two different pricing models.
• Showback report
  A showback report lets you analyze how the costs are distributed among the entities based on a specified distribution policy.

To create a Report manually: Go to the Reports tab, button “Create Reports”

Select the desired Hierarchy.

Figure 22 – Create a report

In our example, we Right-click on the Chargeback Folder, and select “Generate Cost Report” to create a report that will show usage and costs.

Figure 23

• Provide a Name for the report and an optional description
• The User name, represents the owner of the report
• Under Report duration, you have the option to generate the report now and specify the effective period. The other option is to schedule the report. Because we have the VMs already running for some time now, we create an effective period ranging the month December 2012.
• We select our newly creted pricing model
• In this example, we only want to charge a few Computing resources. We select: CPU, Memory and Storage.
• We click Next to proceed to the following section.

Figure 24

• On the Report Summary page, you can include a resource and cost summary. Select the “Include resource summary in report” and/or “Include cost summary in report”.
• And Next.

Figure 25

On the Details Pane. When creating a new report, it is a good idea to place a tick at “Show info messages”. This option is very helpful tracking down issues in a report. You can also specify details about usage and or fixed costs. In our example, we did not add fixed costs.

Figure 26

On the final Pane Attributes, you can create a filter based on self-defined global attributes (like our example, geographical location). Choose submit, and after some time our new report will show up.

Figure 27

The report will show up. From here you can export the report. Reports will be archived under “Archived Reports”.

So, this was a lot of information, but we ended up with a report. Now it is time to analyze your results, add more costs, create new pricing models, and so on.

As always, I welcome your comments and thank you for reading.

P.S. While I was working on these blog post, Lawrence Kohan presented an excellent #vBrownBag deep dive on vCenter Chargeback Manager last January, followed up by an extensive demo a few weeks later. I highly recommend watching these sessions.

I suppose you have installed vCCM without any problems and all services are running. vCCM has quite a number of services, which should  start automatically.

To log in to vCCM, you will need a supported browser, in my case IE 9 and Firefox worked well.

On the vCCM server, you launch the application from the Windows menu. From a remote workstation, provide the application URL, which was displayed after installing vCCM.

When you log in to vCCM for the first time, you will be prompted to enter a license key.

Figure 1 – License

Provide the License key and the credentials, created during the installation. When the license key has been accepted, you can log in to the application.

We will start with a few generic settings. Most configuration will be done on the tab “Settings”.

Figure 2 – Settings

Settings – General

Here you can configure the SMTP settings for outgoing email. In case you want to send generated reports directly to your contacts, you should configure this setting.

Figure 3 – SMTP settings

The last option “Enable password protection for emailed PDF documents”, PDF report are password protected when sent by email. The password is sent through a separate email.

Further the Log level can be adjusted, options are: trace, debug, info, warn, error and fatal.

The “Set VM Instance Job Interval”, relates to checks for updated hierarchies, the default 300 seconds is OK.

The last one on this page, Configure Storage Infrastructure Costing Mode is important in case you work with Storage Profiles.

• Profile Based, means that storage whose capabilities match the storage profile defined on the virtual machine is considered for cost calculation.
• Placement Based; the storage on which the virtual machine files reside is considered for cost calculation.

Settings – LDAP Servers

You can give Windows Active Directory users access to vCCM. The application only supports Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Active Directory. We will continue and use our local account.

Settings – vCenter Servers

This is an important configuration step. To determine the utilization of computing resources by the virtual machines and calculate the total costs, you must first add the vCenter Server instances in your virtual environment to vCenter Chargeback Manager. You can add more than one vCenter Server to the application.

• The vCenter Server must be accessible over the network.
• The vCenter Server and its database must have static IP addresses, if not provide the FQDN.
• System time on the vCenter Server, the Chargeback Manager server, and both database server must be in sync.
• On the vCenter Server, create a new user, for example: vCCM
• On the vCenter Server, create a new role, for example: vCMM. Make a copy of the Read-only role and add the following privileges:
  • Storage views.View
  • Storage views.Configure service  *)
  • Global.Licenses
  • Extension.Register extension
  • Extension.Unregister extension
  • Extension.Update extension
  • Profile-driven storage.Profile-driven storage view;
    if you are using vCenter Server 5.0.
  • Global.vCenter Operations User;
    if you have integrated the vCenter Server with VMware vCenter Operations.

Figure 4-vCCM role

*) This is different from the official documentation. In my case “Storage Synchronization” in the embedded Chargeback Manager Data Collector failed, until I added the Storage views.Configure service  privilege.

• In vCenter Server, on the highest level, under permissions, assign the new role to the new user account.
• On the vCenter Database Server, create a database user, for example: vCCM_DB.
• The new database user must have read access on the following views of the vCenter database: VPXV_HIST_STAT_DAILY, VPXV_HIST_STAT_WEEKLY, VPXV_HIST_STAT_MONTHLY, and VPXV_HIST_STAT_YEARLY.
• In the vCenter Chargebackmanager, go to settings and button “vCenter Servers”
• Choose “Add” and be prepared to provide a lot of information:

Figure 5 – Add vCenter

• vCenter Server Hostname/IP: the static IP address of the vCenter server or the FQDN, as discussed before.
• The vCenter Server Display Name and Description, is exactly what you think it is.
• The vCenter Server Username is the new vCenter Server user account.
• The Database URL, in my case it’s a MS SQL instance installed on my vCenter Server.
• The Database type, default is SQL Server or Oracle.
• The Authentication Type, available if you choose SQL server. “Credential Based Authentication” refers to using SQL Server authentication. Windows Authentication, in case you created an Active Directory database user account.
• Database username, the new database user.
• Register As vSphere Client Plug-in, registers a vCenter Chargeback Manager plug-in to the vSphere Client. Place a thick here.
• Enable Stats Replication, replicates resource usage statistics from the vCenter Server Database to the vCenter Chargeback Manager Database. Also place a thick here.

Figure 6

• Accept the SSL certificate when presented.

Figure 7

• If everything works according to plan, the vCenter Server should appear in the overview.
• Verify that “Stats Replication Enabled” is set to true.

Note: If you have selected the Enable Stats Replication option. By default, the stats collection level is set to 1 in vCenter Server. With this level setting, the split utilization data for disk read and disk write, and network transmitted and network received cannot be fetched. See VMware KB 2010099 to correct this.

Settings – Data Collectors

The next step is checking the Data Collectors. During the installation of vCCM, we have installed the vCenter Chargeback Manager Data Collector. Optionally you can install the vCloud Director data collector and the vShield Manager data collector.

Go to Settings and button “Data Collectors”. Information about all Data Collectors is displayed at this location.

Figure 8 – Data Collector

• Data Collectors must show Registered = True. This means the Data collector is enabled.
• The Job State for each Job Type should not show “Failed”, but “Active” or “Done” are fine.
• Under some conditions, the first run of the Storage Synchronization might fail. Further the VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices service must be running on the vCenter Server. For vCenter Server 5.0, the VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage service must also be running on the vCenter Server.
• For more details, have a look at table 2-1 in the vCenter Chargeback Manager User’s Guide
• At this moment, I will skip the Cloud Director Data Collector.

The other settings are less important for creating reports. We will discuss these briefly.

Settings – Report View

vCCM provides a report view that is used by all the generated reports. You can configure the report view to display a specific set of information in each of the generated reports.

Reports have multiple sections. You can pre-configure headers, titles and footers.

• The Title section appears only on the first page of the report.
• The Header section is the report header that appears on all pages except the first.
• The Footer section is the report footer that appears on all the pages.

Figure 9 – Header

Settings – Attributes

An attribute provides additional information about an entity in a hierarchy. You can define an attribute in the application and then assign it to an entity.

For example, you can create an attribute called Geo_location, and then assign it to various entities and set values indicating their geographic locations. The attributes set on the hierarchy and entities can be used to filter the hierarchies and entities on which a report needs to be generated or scheduled.

Figure 10 – Attributes

Settings – System Health Thresholds

The System Health tab provides information about the status of the entire system based on the response time of the various servers and databases in the system. The response time limits can be set in the application.

Figure 11 – System Health

Settings – Manage Computing Resources

On the Computing Resources page of the Settings tab, you can specify the computing resources that will be available to the users in vCenter Chargeback Manager.

Figure 12 – Computing Resources

This concludes the basic configuration. In the next episode, we will create our first Reports. Thank you for reading, and as always, I welcome your comments.

So, I expected to find a lot of posts on this subject, but I did not. For that reason, in a series of posts, I will share my experience with the vCCM. In the first part, let’s start with the installation of vCCM.

Note: In my case, I installed vCCM for training purposes. For that reason, I did not completely follow all steps and recommendations in the official documentation. So, in case, you need to install vCCM in a real-life production environment, I recommended having a look at the vCenter Chargeback Manager Installation and Upgrade Guide.

You can find the official resources here and start a free trial for 60 days. Some useful official documents are:

• vCenter Chargeback Manager Installation and Upgrade Guide
• vCenter Chargeback Manager User’s Guide
• Best Practices and Troubleshooting Guide

What is vCCM

In a few word, vCCM is an end-to-end cost reporting solution for virtual environments using vSphere. vCenter Chargeback Manager can also be used with VMware vCloud Director. So you can also use vCCM when you are running one or more vSphere Clusters, without vCloud Director!

According to VMware: “Chargeback is a mechanism to account for the operational costs involved in providing and maintaining an IT infrastructure, including the costs for IT services and applications. Measuring resource utilization and calculating the corresponding IT operational cost enables you to account for the IT resources utilized and bill for the services provided.”

vCCM is optimized for and can only be used in virtual environments.

vCCM Overview

Figure 1 – (c) VMware

vCCM consists of the following elements:

• vCCM Server,
  an Apache Tomcat server that runs on a Microsoft Windows Server.
• vCCM Database,
  vCMM needs a database instance. Either a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP4, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (R2), Oracle 10g (r1 or R2) or Oracle 11g (r1 or R2).
• Load Balancer,
  users interact with the vCCM through a Load balancer.
• Data Collectors,
  retrieve inventory and resource usage information for each VM from the vCenter server. In a vCloud environment, you can install the vCloud Director data collector.
• vCCM UI,
  Users connect to vCCM through a web-browser (IE 7 or 8, Firefox and Adobe Flash Player plug-in)

When you install vCenter Chargeback Manager, a load balancer and a data collector can also be installed and run on the same machine. You can also choose to install the load balancer, vCenter Chargeback Manager Server, and data collector on different machines. Although the vCenter Chargeback Manager database can also be installed on the same machine, in a real-world scenario you would install the application and the database on separate machines.

In my case, I have installed all components on a single Windows Server 2008 R2 server configured with 1 vCPU and 2 GB Memory.

Before starting the actual installation, it is a good idea to use the vCCM Pre-Install Checklist in the vCenter Chargeback Manager Installation and Upgrade Guide, especially:

• Network configuration:
  • FQDN or static IP address: 192.168.100.121
  • Port numbers, HTTP: 8080
    Load-balancer:8009
    HTTPS: 443

• Database configuration:
  • Type: MS SQL 2008 R2
  • Database name: vCCM
  • IP address of the vCCM database: 192.168.100.121
  • Database instance name: sqlexpress
  • Database user name: vCCM_User
  • Password for this user: *****
  • If using Windows Authentication, Windows user account, password etc.
• Software configuration:
  • Check system time on all servers and databases:
  • MS SQL Server, SQL Server Browser service is running:
  • Is MSI installation enabled:
  • Set port exceptions on Windows firewall for ports mentioned above:

Preparing the vCCM database

For those not familiar setting up a new MS SQL database, here are the steps. Otherwise, skip to the next session, but do not forget to set the correct permissions for the database user .

• I assume you have a MS SQL server up and running. In my case I have installed a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express edition, link here.
• During the installation a database instance will be created
• Create a database, in my case the name is: vCCM

Figure 2 – Create database

• Create a database user, in my case: vCCM_User. I have used SQL Server Authentication.

Figure 3 – Create db user

• Set the default database to the vCCM database
• Set the default schema for the user to dbo

Figure 4 – check schema

• Execute the following commands to assign the correct privileges to the user. This will also create a new role; CB_ADMIN_ROLE.

Figure 5 – set privileges

The commands in clear text:

USE vCCM
GO
CREATE ROLE CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT ALTER ON SCHEMA :: DBO TO CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT REFERENCES ON SCHEMA :: DBO TO CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT INSERT ON SCHEMA :: DBO TO CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT SELECT ON SCHEMA :: DBO TO CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT DELETE ON SCHEMA :: DBO TO CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT UPDATE ON SCHEMA :: DBO TO CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT EXECUTE ON SCHEMA :: DBO TO CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT ALTER ANY DATASPACE TO CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT CREATE TABLE to CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT CREATE VIEW to CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT CREATE PROCEDURE to CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GRANT CREATE FUNCTION TO CB_ADMIN_ROLE;
GO
sp_addrolemember CB_ADMIN_ROLE, vCCM_User

Where:

vCCM is the database name.

vCCM_User is dtabase user name.

CB_ADMIN_ROLE is the new role.

Figure 6 – Review results

• Check the results, go to Security, Roles and select the new role CB_AMIN_ROLE.

Figure 7 – review permissions

According to the official documentation, now you should calculate and check the maximum number of database connections to the database. The number of connections depends on the number of vCCM severs and data collector (see table 3-1 in documentation).

Before we start the actual installation, I assume you have at least your new vCCM server up and running. Do not forget to add rules to the firewall, for the ports specified.

Figure 8 – firewall settings

Installing vCCM

If you choose to install the load balancer and the vCenter Chargeback Manager server on different machines, then you must first install the load balancer and then the vCenter Chargeback Manager server.

• Run the vCenter-CB.exe file.

Figure 9 – start installation

• Click Next on the Introduction screen.

Figure 10 – Introduction

• Accept the end-user license agreement, and click Next.

Figure 11 – License

• Choose the installation folder. The install path must contain at least one folder. You cannot provide only the drive name. Also, the directory path must contain only ASCII characters

Figure 12 – Folder

• Enter the vCenter Chargeback Manager database-related information, and click Next
  Here the Pre-Install Checklist will help you providing the correct information.

Figure 13 – Database configuration

• Test the connection. If the connection fails, have a look at the error message, try to troubleshoot and fix it.

Figure 14 – success

• When you use the MS SQL Express edition, like I did, you will be presented with the message that your database does not support partitions. Because this is just a POC, we choose Continue.

Figure 15 -

• Enter the load balancer-related information, and click Next. This load balancer runs on the vCCM server, so provide the IP address of the vCCM server. Do not provide “localhost”.

Figure 16 – load balancer

• Select Install vCenter Chargeback Manager Server, enter the IP address and port details for the vCenter Chargeback Manager, and click Next.

Figure 17 – Server configuration

• Enter a user name and password for the vCenter Chargeback Manager administrative account, and click Next.

Figure 18 – Admin user

• Select the data collectors that you want to install and click Next. The Install vCenter Chargeback Manager Data Collector option is selected by default. Optional select other data collectors. You can also install data collector later on.

Figure 19 – data collector

• In case you have chosen to install the Cloud Director data collector, provide the requested information.
  In case you have a vCloud Director version 1.5.x, you need to provide more information.

Figure 20 -

• Review the information displayed on the Pre-Installation Summary screen, and click Install to start the actual installation.

Figure 21 – Install

• Click OK, when you see this message.

Figure 22

• The installation ends with a message that errors occurred during installation. We discuss this later. The URL for accessing vCCM is displayed, in our case: https://192.168.100.121:443/cbmui/

Figure 23 – Done

• Following, a dialog is displayed, with two options for generating a SSL certificate; a default SSL certificate or an own certificate. The last option is recommended. Because this is a POC, we choose “Generate default SSL certificate”. There is an option available to replace the default SSL certificate with a self-signed certificate at a later time.

Figure 24

To conclude the installation, let’s have look at the reported errors. The name of the installation log is: VMware_vCenter_Chargeback_InstallLog.log and can be found in this folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vCenter Chargeback.

The summary shows 2 NonFatalErrors.

Figure 25 – Errors

It turns out that during installation, the provided vCloud Director server was not available.

Status: ERROR
Additional Notes: ERROR - Sun Dec 30 11:35:42 CET 2012
ERROR - Failed to connect to VCD specfied by the user with ip, https://192.168.100.11
Status: ERROR
Additional Notes: ERROR - Sun Dec 30 11:36:28 CET 2012
ERROR - Failed to connect to VCD specfied by the user with ip, https://192.168.100.11/cloud

This concludes the first part about vCenter Chargeback Manager. In the next episode, we will start with the basic configuration.

As always, I welcome your comments and I thank you for reading.

vOPS Server Explorer is a freeware suite, this version adds two new utilities, Storage Explorer and Change Explorer, plus adds improvements to Environment Explorer. So there are now a total of five utilities in the vOPS free VM tool.

• Environment Explorer
• vScope Explorer
• Search VM Explorer
• Storage Explorer
• Change Explorer

vOPS Server Explorer uses the same analytics and advisory engine from the paid vOPS Server Standard product, all five of these utilities provide virtual administrators with a rapid assessment of the state of their environment.

Figure 1 – Storage Explorer (provided by Dell)

Storage Explorer

• Extensive storage performance and capacity views across datastores and VMs
• Identifies critical datastore issues such as overcommitment, low capacity, high latency, VMFS version mismatch
• Identifies critical VM issues such as low available disk space, high latency and throughput
•  Allows user to sort on any metric to find specific issues relevant to them

Change Explorer

• Lists all changes that occurred to datacenters, clusters, resource pools, hosts, datastores and VMs within the last seven days with associated risk impact
• Allows user to filter on object name, user and type to find specific changes
• Number of changes also represented graphically over time to be able to see when they are occurring

These  new free utilities will for no cost, immediately inform system administrators on whether they have performance, capacity or critical configuration changes occurred in their environment. Many datacenters pay consultants for environment health checks to come to the same conclusions.

vOPS Server Explorer 6.3 is available for download now: http://www.vkernel.com/download/server-explorer

I have started this blog two years ago. While helping a friend, setting up his own WordPress.com blog, I decided to create another blog for my own purposes. My primary reason for publishing is to answer those questions, I can not find a suitable answer anywhere else. Information provided is for everyone searching for answers.

The best part of writing a blog, is to receive feedback. For that reason, I want to thank all readers who took the time to write me a message of appreciation, with questions or some extra information.

The number of page views of “Adventures in a Virtual World” increased over 100% to 99.000 views in 2012. I want to thank all my readers  for these numbers.

Wishing you all a very Happy and Healthy New Year. Thank you very much.

Best regards,

Paul

Click here to see the complete report.

The posts were written in preparation for my VCAP5-DCA exam and are based on the official VMware Blueprint. At the time I started writing; other great Study guides were available, although most of these guides were based on the VCAP4-DCA exam.

The posts had to meet the following goals:

• Based on the official Blueprint, follow the objectives as close as possible.
• Refer to the official VMware documentation as much as possible. For that reason, every Objective starts with one or more references to the VMware documentation.
• In case the official documentation is not available or not complete, provide an alternative.
• Write down the essence of every objective (the Summary part).
• If necessary, provide additional explanation, instructions, examples and references to other posts. All this without providing too much information.

I hope all this will help you in your preparation for your exam. I welcome your comments, feedback and questions.

Download Guide: VCAP5-DCA Study Guide_20121229