This one is going to be short and sweet, at least it was to me.
I upgraded my vRealize Automation environment in our IAS lab to version 7.3. I had a few hiccups because of an old IaaS node that had been replaced and never cleaned up (which you can read about in my other post this week), but other than it was pretty smooth. I also took the opportunity to upgrade the vRealize Business for Cloud to 7.3 to keep everything the same version, as a good engineer would. 🙂
There were quite a few updates to vRB this time around, and those familiar with vRB will noticed the significant changes to the UI layout and reporting. A lot of the plumbing is similar when you start to drill down into things, but some new information is now available for customers. I’m not going to go through all of the new features in this post, but if you want to read more, here’s the release notes link:
https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Business/7.3/rn/vRBforCloud-73-release-notes.html
But what I found to be extremely valuable to myself, was the money that I’ve been wasting for the past few years on AWS instances that had been forgotten about. A few years ago we were looking at a solution, which I won’t mention but from looking at the picture you could probably guess, that we had stopped using in the lab but had apparently never cleaned up entirely.
vRB now reports specific instances within EC2 quite easily. I did notice that there was a little lag to this feature as it pulled information into the report, but the results were worth the wait. I had 7 instances in our AWS lab that I had completely forgotten about. Luckily, they were turned off and thus only generating a small amount of cost, but they were costs nonetheless. My fault in not cleaning it up but apparently when the engineer was testing this solution, they put the instances in a different region than I typically work with, so I’ve been clueless this whole time.
Now, granted, I should have known if I looked at the bills, but the cost was so little. But looking at our customers today, there are quite many many of them that look at the bill and go “who knows” what makes up the entire bill from AWS or Azure. At a certain point, we’re just accepting the charges and hoping they are accurate. If you’re one of those organizations that audits their cloud activity, props to you and great job. For the rest of us, vRB is solution that easily report the activity and help make informed decisions on what’s going on.
In this particular example, I only wasted $1.05 over the past three years with these instances just sitting there. (Whew!) But had these seven instances been part of a larger environment in AWS and were actually powered on, the costs would have been much higher. And again, this is what vRB is bringing to your table. Insight into what’s going on in your clouds so that you can make better decisions for your business.
If you want to learn more about vRealize Business for Cloud, or any VMware solutions, please feel free to contact me and let’s see how we can help.