vRealize Business for Cloud provides users greater visibility into the financial aspects of their IaaS delivery and lets them optimize and improve these operations.

The architecture illustrates the main components of vRealize Business for Cloud, the server, FactsRepo inventory service, data transformation service, data collection services, and reference database.

Figure 1. vRealize Business for Cloud Architecture

Data Collection Services

Data collection services include a set of services for each private and public cloud endpoint such as vCenter Server, vCloud Director, and AWS for retrieving both inventory information (servers, virtual machines, clusters, storage devices, and associations between them) and usage (CPU and memory) statistics. The data collected from data collection services is used for cost calculations.

FactsRepo Inventory Service

It is an inventory service built on MongoDB to store the collected data that the vRealize Business for Cloud server uses for the cost computation.

Data Transformation Service

The data transformation service converts the data received from data collection services into the structures consumable by FactsRepo. The data transformation service is a single point of aggregation of data from all data collectors.

vRealize Business for Cloud Server

vRealize Business for Cloud server is a web application that runs on Pivotal tc Server. vRealize Business for Cloud has multiple data collection services that run periodically to collect inventory information and statistics and uses vPostgres as the persistent store. The data collected from data collection services is used for cost calculations
Note: The vPostgres stores only computed data; FactsRepo stores raw data.

Reference Database

This component is responsible for providing default, out-of-the-box costs for each of the supported cost drivers. Reference database is updated automatically or manually, and user can download the latest data set and import the data set into vRealize Business for Cloud. The new values affect cost calculation. Reference data that is used depends on currency you select during installation. You cannot change the currency configuration after deploying vRealize Business for Cloud.

Communication between Server and Reference Database

Reference database is a compressed and encrypted file, which the users can download and install manually or update automatically. You can update the most current version of reference database. For more information, see Update the Reference Database for vRealize Business for Cloud.

Other Sources of Information

These sources are optional, and are used only if installed and configured. The sources include vRealize Automation, vCloud Director, vRealize Operations Manager, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and EMC Storage Resource Manager (SRM).

How vRealize Business for Cloud works

vRealize Business for Cloud collects data from external sources continuously and periodically updates FactsRepo. The collected data can be viewed on the dashboard or can generate the report. The data synchronization or update happens at regular interval. However, you can manually trigger the data collection process when the inventory changes occur, such as initialization of the system or addition of a private, public, or hybrid cloud account.

External Interfaces

Below are the interfaces/APIs published to external applications.

Interface Description
vRealize Automation Calls vRealize Business for Cloud to get the cost profiles