CloudHealth Hybrid — General Availability

We are pleased to announce the general availability of CloudHealth Hybrid. CloudHealth Hybrid brings together the functionality of CloudHealth Data Center and VMware vRealize Business for Cloud (vRBC) into a single standalone SaaS offering, with new features including data center rightsizing, and new cost benchmarks and cost drivers.

In addition, we are inviting you to participate in an early access program to test the new capabilities for VMware Cloud on AWS within CloudHealth Hybrid, before it’s generally available. There is no cost to participate in the early access program and existing CloudHealth customers will see no change to their CloudHealth platform.

Learn more about CloudHealth Hybrid in this Help Center article, and get early access to VMware Cloud on AWS support by contacting cloudhealth-hybrid@groups.vmware.com.

Google Compute Engine (GCE) Rightsizing — General Availability

We are excited to announce the release of the CloudHealth GCE Rightsizing Report. This report displays recommendations to increase or decrease the size of GCE instances based off of CPU or RAM utilization.

In addition to viewing your recommendation based off of the projected cost, you can also use a field titled ‘Recommendation Age’ to ensure that recommendations have been valid for at least one full usage cycle.

To use this feature, you’ll need to enable the Recommender API in each project. If you are utilizing a custom role, you’ll also need to enable the four IAM permissions listed below. If utilizing the Project Editor role, you only need to enable the Recommender API.

• recommender.computeInstanceMachineTypeRecommendations.get

• recommender.computeInstanceMachineTypeRecommendations.list

• recommender.locations.get

• recommender.locations.list

Learn more about GCE Rightsizing in this Help Center article.

Support for AWS Savings Plans

As you may have heard, AWS recently announced a new offering called Savings Plans. This new offering is a new way to reduce your EC2 and Fargate costs while maintaining maximum flexibility. Read more about Savings Plans in our blog post.

If you decide to invest in Savings Plans in the near term, CloudHealth will be able to help you gain visibility into how they’re applied, and help you get the most out of your RI investments as AWS will be applying RIs for coverage before Savings Plans. Initially, Savings Plans fees and credits will show up as indirect line items in the CloudHealth Cost History Report.

Learn more about CloudHealth’s support for AWS Savings Plans in this Help Center article. Stay tuned for more updates into how CloudHealth will be incorporating Savings Plans into our vision of Cloud Financial Management.

Update Your IAM Policy Permissions — Action Required

As we build additional support for AWS Savings Plans, access to the Savings Plan API enables CloudHealth to provide better reporting. For a more future proof policy, we recommend the following:

• savingsplans:Describe*

For a more explicit policy, please use:

• savingsplans:DescribeSavingsPlans

Learn more about updating AWS account policies in this Help Center article.

Updates to Budget Configuration and All-New User Experience — Coming Soon

Budgets define your expected cloud spend on a month-by-month basis. They also allow you to visualize your expected costs for the year in advance and compare with actual spend as the year progresses. We are pleased to announce an upcoming all-new user experience for budget configuration across clouds, with several highly requested enhancements including:

• Multiple budgets: Create as many overall and categorized budgets you need to run your business

• Simple import/export of budget data: Import your budget data via .CSV for configuring budgets at scale

• Non-calendar fiscal year support: Align your budgets with your fiscal year

• Option to include Amortized Cost in Actual Cost: Substitute your RI Prepays with amortized cost

Learn more about the updates to budgets in this Help Center article.