What is vCloud Usage Meter?

vCloud Usage Meter is an on-premises virtual appliance used to collect and generate reports for Cloud Provider Partners (VCPP) to send back to VMware for monthly billing of usage.

Usage Meter collects usage of the VMware products that are installed in the cloud provider’s datacenter. The current version of Usage Meter (4.1) supports usage collection from the following endpoints:

How Usage Meter collects and reports monthly product consumption data is explained Here

vCloud Usage Insight

vCloud Usage Insight is a VMware cloud service that aggregates and automates monthly and end-user reporting from on-premise vCloud Usage Meter instances to the VMware Cloud Provider Commerce Portal. With vCloud Usage Insight, you retain full control over the usage report data in the Commerce Portal before submission.

To learn more about vCloud Usage Meter & Usage Insight, check VMware’s official Documentation

Usage Meter Installation Requirements

I am not going to cover the nitty-gritty of installation prerequisites, as everything is well documented Here

vCloud Usage Meter is distributed as a virtual appliance (ova) and can be downloaded from Here

vCloud UM deployment is pretty straightforward, like any other OVA deployment. Below is a screenshot from the configuration step where you just have to supply passwords for the root and usage meter accounts and the network info. 

Note: There is a caveat in deploying the usage meter in an environment backed by NSX N-VDS networking. In an N-VDS environment, the Usage Meter deployment needs a Network Profile to be created in vCenter.

You will get to see the error below when vCenter tries to power on the Usage Meter VM.

So, in an N-VDS-only environment, you have to deploy the usage meter against the ESXi host directly.

Once UM boots up, open the VM console to find the login url.  Typically it is https://<vcloud-um-fqdn>:8443/

Login as the “usagemeter” user using the password set during deployment.

Accept the EULA and click Next to continue.

Select whether the Usage Meter VM can connect to the internet directly or through a proxy. 

Before you can add endpoints in Usage Meter, you have to register your UM instance with the VMware Cloud Provider Commerce Portal

Make a note of the Usage Meter ID and login to the commerce portal. Navigate to Home > Contracts > Contract ID > Usage Meter Instances and click “Register New.”

Provide a name for your Usage Meter instance, paste the UUID taken from the previous step, select the UM version and mode, and hit OK.

Switch back to the configuration wizard and click on Check Registration. On successful registration, you will see the screen below with a green check. Hit Finish.

The next step is to add endpoints in UM. The first endpoint that we will add is vCenter Server. 

Click the ADD button and provide our vCenter details.

Accept the vCenter certificate.

Hit the Accept button. 

Adding NSX-T Endpoint.

Navigate to the vRealize Operations endpoint tab. The vROPS instance is auto-discovered, but you must edit and enter the appliance credentials.

Usage Insight Test

Under Home > Settings tab, you can test whether the UM instance is able to send data to vCloud Usage Insight or not. For this, wait at least 15 minutes after your UM registration in the commerce portal.

You can also toggle the logging level as per your infrastructure requirements. 

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