How much is Azure costing me? How much do my VMs cost me in my datacenter? Should I migrate to the Cloud?
Understand the cost of my datacenter you ask?! You heard that correctly, FVE 8.8 is almost, almost, exclusively about managing the cost of running a hybrid datacenter.
FVE 8.8 will be Generally Available July 25th 2018 click here to download a trial.
FVE 8.8 had some great additions, like the Technical Preview of Container Management with support for Kubernetes and Docker Swarm as well as integration into Quest NetVault and a bunch of new dashboards and analytics. However we spent a considerable amount of time focused on reducing the burden of managing the costs of operating a datacenter & running services in the cloud, like he monthly bill of an Azure Instance (VM). And then we took it one step further, we created a database of public cloud virtual machines prices, https://cloud.foglight.com/app and enhanced Capacity Director with an API integration into it, so that you can compare the cost using live public cloud prices to the real, true cost of running a VM in your private datacenter. This means you can see instantly see costs savings or easily justify the decision to stay on-premises.
Continue reading below for some of the finer details.
Cost Director: Most Expensive VMs by CPU Consumption
Cost Director: This is where the magic happens, included as part of FVE for all users, Cost Director sets up computing and storage price plans for your environment. Creating a like-for-like view for your datacenter to major public cloud providers. To make this process easy we created a wizard to calculate the prices of a Ghz, GB of RAM, TB of Storage and IOPS, all you need to provide is the cost of your hypervisor hosts and storage arrays.
How do we set this up?? A cost calculation wizard!
The end result is the grouping of your virtual machines into your organizations business unit structure that enables chargeback reporting that is based on two very critical measures:
- Allocated Cost
- The cost of a VM existing based on the resources it has been allocated, whether or not those resources are being utilized.
- Consumed Cost
- The cost of a VM based on what it actually consumes.
Why is this important? if a VM has 10Ghz and 16GB of RAM and is only consuming half of those resources then a business unit may be overpaying for their required compute.
What about cloud billing and charges?
Foglight Hybrid Cloud Manager now pulls like Azure Billing data so you can see the cost of every Azure service and importantly, the cost of your instances (virtual machines). FVE 8.8 also enhances cloud optimization to ensure that you are not wasting money on Zombie Instances or Orphaned resources such as Storage Accounts.
Azure Billing Dashboard: Subscription Detail.
Azure Cost Optimization
Deep Dive Azure Billing Dashboards
Stay tuned for my next post on FVE 8.8, generally available July 25th, for more details on the enhancements and new features.
Upgrade now at http://support.quest.com/
