In a previous article we have installed / deployed vRealize Business for Cloud 7.2 and have given ourselves the appropriate permissions in vRA to see the vRB specific settings.
Now it is time to configure it. vRB is a beast in itself to be honest and covering the whole product would kinda blow up this article. Plus I don’t work with vRB on daily basis and trying to configure labour costs, hardware costs etc., is just not in my skills-set.
If you are looking to run vRB without vRA, have a look at my other article: vRB without vRA using vIDM
If you followed my article then you will see that I have configured as currency British Punds £
Here I just want to demonstrate how to configure vRB to show you a cost for a Blueprint. So we need to specify a cost for
- £ / CPU / Day
- £ / GB of Ram / Day
- £ / GB of Storage / Day
I will also connect my vCenter to vRB. The costs for my infrastructure will be calculated based on a reference database hold by VMware. And no, I will not bother adding my own costing – but feel free 🙂
Navigate to Business Management. The first time you do this, you will only see a text box to enter your license key.
After adding your license, navigate to Administration > Cloud Management
Navigate to Manage Private Cloud Connections > vCenter Server and click “+”
Add your vCenter details
Install the certificate
Click OK
Navigate back to Business Management
Click 
You SUPPOSED to see an Update Now button .. but it doesn’t seem to work in FireFox
In Chrome however it shows.
Click Update now and close the window
After a while you will get a message at the bottom asking you to refresh the page
Note: If you don’t get this after approx. 10 minutes, just log off / log in again. I am not sure if this is a bug or not but I also noticed that a reboot of the vRB appliance might be necessary.
Once refreshed, the status icon in the top right corner should appear green and the Business Management page should show an inventory of your vcenter.
As mentioned, the idea is to configure some costs for Blueprints.
Navigate to Consumption > Pricing and Charges > Pricing
Click Edit > Edit Pricing
Expand vRealize Automation and Default Reservation (or whatever you have called your reservation). Here I will set a cost on Reservation level. You can set costs on per-blueprint. But that means every time you add a new blueprint, you need to run a vRB collection and set the costs.
This way any blueprint part of the reservation gets automatically a cost associated with.
Of course that depends entirely on your environment and cost level – but as I say – this is just an example.
So here set the costs for compute, memory and storage
Here I configured some random costs which don’t necessarily reflect my actual costs (did I mention ‘example’ ? )
Click Save
Now when you request a blueprint you can click Update to have the daily cost calculated and View Cost Details so see the breakdown.
When using approval policies for example you could determine an approver if the cost exceeds a certain daily limit (this will be the next article)
Once deployed, under your Items you can then see the current costs. Here you can see two items with £0 – that means these VMs have been deployed before vRB was configured.
Next, Approval Policies