Cloud Migration Planner Report

Use the Cloud Migration Planner report to determine the cost-effectiveness of:

  • Migrating VMs from an on-premise environment to a public cloud vendor
  • Migrating VMs to another location in your cloud infrastructure
  • Migrating VMs from one public cloud to a different public cloud
  • Applying current rightsizing recommendations
  • Using public cloud on-demand pricing versus term pricing

While many comparisons work out-of-the-box, you need to configure Cost Models for certain comparisons, such as a migration to another vCenter location. For example, to compare costs for your production and development lab on vCenter, configure distinct cost models for the production and development lab levels of your infrastructure.

You can set this report to show only marked-up and discounted costs using the Cost Adjustments filter, so Service Portal users who view this report will see only your adjusted costs, not your actual costs.

By default, the report includes data for all VMs for which at least one billing record was generated during the period. Templates aren't included in the report.

Report data is based on costs from billing records, which are generated nightly. The costs in the VM billing records, in turn, are calculated from the VM at the time the billing records are written and from the relevant cost model values. See Configure Cost Models for details.

You can select the currency for your report. All costs shown in the report will be converted to this currency. For currency conversion calculations, the conversion rates used are the rates that existed on the dates you select. For projected costs, the latest conversion rate is used.

By default, this report uses historical data. If the cloud account was added to Commander recently, retrieving historical data will provide data for this report. When historical data is retrieved, Commander automatically generates billing records for the retrieval period. If no historical data has been retrieved for public clouds, this report will be empty. To learn how to retrieve historical data, see:

Since GCP doesn’t associate costs with VMs, the Cloud Migration Planner report for GCP will only show the projected cost model, not the historical or current cost models.

Report settings

Access:

Reports > Chargeback and IT Costing > Cloud Migration Planner

Available to:

All Access Rights Levels

During: Specify a time period for the report either By Period or By Dates.

  • When you select By Period, the period will be the last completed day, week, month, quarter or year. For more information, see Time Range Filters
  • When you select By Dates, Commander prepopulates the earliest date available for selection, which is the date when the first cloud account was added to Commander.

Cost Model: Generate VM costs for the Current Location based on:

  • Historical — Use both the cost model and VM resource usage from the billing records. With this option, VM uptime is taken from the nightly billing records, using billing data, if available.

    • If the cloud account was added to Commander recently, retrieving historical data for vCenter, AWS and Azure provides more data for this report.

  • Current — Show costs as though the current cost model were in effect for the specified timeframe, but take VM resource usage from the historical billing records. This option allows you to change your cost model but still use the actual VM resource usage from the billing records. With this option, VM uptime is taken from the nightly billing records.
  • Projected — This is the default option. It shows costs as though the current cost model and current VM resource usage were in effect for the specified timeframe. Only VMs that currently exist are included in the report. With this option, VM uptime is set to 100% for currently running VMs and to 0% for currently powered-off VMs.

    This option is especially useful if you've just installed Commander or if you've just added a cloud account to Commander and there is no historical data.

Current Location — Use the tree to narrow down the set of VMs that are compared (for example, choose a cloud account or your Production infrastructure). You can only use GCP as the Current Location with the Projected cost model.

Projected Destination — Use the tree to choose a projected destination for cost calculation. You can choose from:

  • Infrastructure — Use the Infrastructure view to choose a location in one of your connected cloud accounts.

    For public cloud destinations, you must navigate down to the Region level. If you're not sure which region to select, select the one closest to you geographically.

    If the current location is on AWS, this difference may be significant, because t2 instance types on AWS can provide a significant discount. It's a good idea to examine the per-VM costs in the VM Costs to Date table at the bottom of the report.

  • Applications — Use the Applications view to choose a location in one of your connected cloud accounts. Cost models targeting the Infrastructure view always take precedence over cost models targeting the Applications view.

    You can't select a public cloud from the Applications tree, because the region can't be determined from the Applications view targets.

  • Supported Cloud Costs — Choose from the default cost models for supported clouds, plus any Cost Models you've configured.
  • Other Cloud Costs — Choose from the cost models for unsupported public clouds.

Recommendations — Specify whether rightsizing recommendations are included in the cost calculations. You can choose all recommendations, only upsizing recommendations, or only downsizing recommendations.

If the projected destination is a public cloud, Commander calculates costs by predicting the best-match instance type. For example, if Commander has recommended downsizing a VM to 1 vCPU and 0.6 GB memory and you are projecting costs on AWS, costs will be calculated as if the VM had a Micro instance type in the AWS cloud account.

Results in single table — By default, results are shown in multiple tables. If you are only calculating the benefit of applying rightsizing recommendations (meaning that Current Location and Projected Destination are the same), displaying the results in a single table makes more sense. If you select Yes, the single table is labeled Current and Projected. Note that this option only has an effect if rightsizing recommendations are applied to the report (that is, the Recommendations option is set to something other than None).

Uptime Percentage — Choose to show or hide the Uptime (%) column in the report. By default, this column is hidden. This column displays the uptime percentage for each VM in the report. VM uptime affects report costs if any costs have been set to be calculated only while VMs are running.

VM uptime calculations are related to the Cost Model report option. When the Cost Model option is set to Current costs or Historical costs, VM uptime is taken from the nightly billing records. When the Cost Model setting is set to Projected costs, by contrast, VM uptime is set to 100% for currently running VMs and to 0% for currently powered-off VMs.

Upgrade note: Billing records created before the introduction of the VM uptime feature are considered to have an uptime percentage of 100% for reporting purposes.

Costs will be calculated based on VM uptime if either the source cost model or the destination cost model have cost elements that apply only when the VM is running.

Cost Adjustments — If you want the report to show your actual costs, keep the default of None. If you want the report to reflect any markups and discounts that you have set, select Include Markups and Discounts. This report can be shared with Service Portal users in the Published Reports section. When Service Portal users view this report with adjusted values, they won't see any indication that the costs are marked-up or discounted.

If you include Markups and Discounts in this report, you may want to add a comment in the Comment section to remind yourself that these costs are adjusted. Service Portal users will see the comment if they view the report, so the comment should be something that does not reveal that these are adjusted costs. For example: "Customer Report".

Currency — Select the currency for the report. All costs shown in the report will be converted to this currency.

Group By — Select a custom attribute for grouping the report data (for example, you can group by cost center). Grouping affects only the two VM Costs to Date tables.

Add Advanced Filters — You can filter the report by VM name, custom attributes and ownership (both individual and organizational ownership).

When filtering by a custom attribute, Commander retrieves the list of all VMs which existed in the location targeted by the report during the reporting period. Records for any VM for which there is no billing record are discarded. Then, records for any VMs that did not have the selected custom attribute applied on at least one of the following points in time are discarded:

  • The first day of the reporting period
  • The day the VM was created
  • The day the VM was deleted
  • The last day of the reporting period

This means that it's possible for VMs with the filtering attribute applied on other dates to be excluded from the report.

Once the rows are filtered to VMs with the filtering attributes applied on one of these dates, the complete billing records for the reporting period will be displayed, whether or not the attribute was applied for the entire period.

The advanced filter Organization Name provides a contains operator. For example, if you have organizations named Acme 1 and Acme 2, filtering the report by Organization Name contains Acme ensures that the report contains data for both organizations. Note that the advanced Organization Name filter doesn't take cost allocation into account.

If an organization name has been changed and you filter on the new organization name, billing data created prior to upgrading to Commander 7.5 won't be included in the report.

For more information on setting report options, see Running and Scheduling Reports.

Generating a report for downsizing recommendations

To see whether applying downsizing recommendations for VMs in a particular cost center would be cost-effective:

  1. In the Report Generator, from Cost Model , choose Projected.
  2. Leave the default settings for Current Location (Global) and Projected Destination (Current).
  3. From Recommendations, choose Only Rightsize Down.
  4. From Results In Single Table, choose Yes.
  5. Click Add Advanced Filters.
  6. From Select a Property, choose Custom Attributes > Cost Center.
  7. Enter the name of your cost center in the text field.
  8. Click Generate.

Understanding the report

The report calculates whether migrating and/or rightsizing the VMs will provide cost savings. For migration assessment, the report shows you costs for the length of the period, for the current location and the projected location side-by-side, with tables and graphs showing cost breakdown. The recommended location is indicated. The report also displays the projected savings for the period.

All public cloud costs are estimates and are intended for planning purposes only.

For rightsizing recommendations, the report shows you costs for the VMs prior to and after applying the recommendations. The RECOMMENDED and NOT RECOMMENDED labels are not displayed if you are assessing only rightsizing recommendations (that is, you have not selected a Projected Destination).

When not all VMs have billing records for the entire specified timeframe, the message "Complete billings records not available for all VMs" is displayed.

VM Costs to Date tables

VM cost details are provided under "Current" and "Projected". The Days column represents the number of days that a billing record was generated for the VM.

VMs Without Billing Records table

You may see a table at the bottom of the report titled "VMs Without Billing Records". This table includes:

  • VMs that have been managed by Commander for less than a day
  • VMs for which Commander has no historical events

How storage tiers affect the report

Because Commander can't guarantee that the storage tier associated with a VM's datastore will match a storage tier for a datastore in the new location, Commander always calculates projected costs based on the current storage tier.

If the projected destination has no available datastore on the same storage tier, the following warning is displayed under the Report Parameters section:

Note: Storage tier(s) <list of missing storage tiers> do not exist at the projected location.

If you pick a current location or projected destination where the storage tier information isn't available (that is, a destination other than a resource pool or compute resource/cluster), then Commander doesn't verify that the storage tiers are available at the projected destination.