8.5.0 Release Notes

Release date: 2020-12-17

Snow Commander Release Notes for version 8.5, covering new features, upgrade notes, deprecated features, resolved issues, and known issues.

What's new

You can now enable the Azure Hybrid Benefit on Azure VMs and Azure SQL databases directly through the Commander administrative interface, the Service Portal, or through REST calls instead of separately logging into the Azure Portal. Combined with the previously released Azure Software License Report, you can now:

  • Achieve significant cost savings on your Microsoft OS VMs and SQL Server purchases on Azure.
  • Realize the savings that you may have identified through the Azure Software License Report or through public cloud software licensing searches.
  • Provide Service Portal users with the ability to set the Azure Hybrid Benefit on the Azure VMs and Azure SQL databases that they own.

For more information, see Azure Software Licensing Report, Running and Scheduling Saved Searches, and Enabling Azure Hybrid Benefits for services.

To set the Azure Hybrid Benefit on resources, Service Portal users must be assigned a Service Portal role that has the Manage License Options permission enabled.

We’ve improved the Reserved Instance (RI) Recommendations report, to help you further optimize your AWS RI spend:

  • Replaces the Reserved Instance Planner report.

  • Changed from hourly to daily time granularity for your AWS billing report.

  • Updated the Reserved Instance Recommendation Configuration dialog with more settings to further customize your reserved instance recommendations.

  • Reserved Instance Recommendations will be enabled by default in version 8.5. There's a fee of $0.01 USD per request to AWS to retrieve recommendation data. Generally, only one request is required. For accounts with many resources, multiple requests may be required.

For more information, see Managing Reserved Instance Recommendations and Reserved Instance Recommendations Report.

When you synchronize the tags used for your Azure cloud accounts, any Azure SQL database tags are now also synchronized.

This covers both the synchronization of Azure SQL database tags that are imported from your cloud account, and the synchronization of custom attributes and metadata from Commander, which is exported as tags to your cloud account (tag pushing).

Azure SQL Database Tag Synchronization enhances inventory and reporting and ensures that tags are displayed properly for users whether they are logged in to the AWS portal or Commander.

For more information, see Synchronizing Azure Tags and Commander Metadata.

Snow Commander and the Service Portal now support all AWS Elastic Load Balancer types. This provides you with a more complete picture of your deployed cloud applications.

The supported AWS Load Balancers types are: 

  • Classic Load Balancer — This load balancer type is used to route transport layer (TCP/SSL) or the application layer (HTTP/HTTPS) traffic. A Classic Load Balancer can be used for applications that were built within an EC2-Classic network. Prior to version 8.5, Commander only supported "EC2 Elastic Load Balancers", which are now referred to as "Classic Load Balancers".
  • Application Load Balancer — This load balancer type is used to route HTTP and HTTPS traffic for application architectures, including microservices and containers.
  • Network Load Balancer — This load balancer type is used to route TCP, UDP, and TLS traffic within a VPC when high performance is required.

You can also perform administrative actions for all AWS Load Balancer types. This includes actions such as setting ownership, adding custom attributes, or running a workflow on a load balancer.

We continue to expand the REST v3 API coverage to help further integrations and automation.

  • Azure hybrid benefit — Enable or disable the Azure Hybrid Benefit on Azure virtual machines and on Azure databases.
  • Namespaces — Retrieve Kubernetes namespaces and manage their ownership.
  • Placement priorities — Manage placement priorities for intelligent placement to configure how Commander rates valid deployment destinations.
  • Destination quotas — Set cost or resource quota limits for each deployment destination available to an organization or an organization member.
  • Separate API documentation — Commander API documentation is now separate from Service Portal API documentation, so you can distinguish which endpoints are available to either Commander API users or Service Portal API users. You can also discover the differences in authentication requirements between the Commander and Service Portal APIs.
  • Service Portal API enhancements — Browse and manage VMs, VM attributes, and VM images. Manage the Azure Hybrid Benefit on Azure VMs and Azure SQL databases.
  • Filtering service requests — Filter service requests by the date the request completed.

For a basic overview on how to use the REST v3 API, see Get Started in the REST v3 API guide. To browse the API reference, see Snow Commander REST API.

  • Optimized billing retrieval to be 5-10% faster for a typical cloud account to improve the performance of billing data-related features.
  • Enhancements to the cost and Service Portal dashboards that improve their usability and functionality.
  • In Service Portal Dashboard Applications widget, you can now group services by Resource Type. This is an extremely valuable way to get a quick categorized view of your resources, such as VMs, Instances, Load Balancers, and Databases. For more information, see Customize the Service Portal.

Upgrade notes

You can upgrade to Commander version 8.5 from versions 8.0.x, 8.1.x, 8.2.x, 8.3.x, and 8.4.x. See Upgrading Commander in the Installation Guide.

Before upgrading, it's recommended that you review all release notes between the version you're currently using and the version you're upgrading to. Release notes for previous Commander versions are available at Release Notes Archive.

Upgrading to version 8.5 will affect the following:

We replaced the Reserved Instance Planner report with the Reserved Instance Recommendations report. Reserved Instance Recommendations will be enabled by default in version 8.5 and the new report will accrue costs. If you had a scheduled task to email the Reserved Instance Planner report to you, that task will be removed in 8.5, so you'll no longer receive Reserved Instance Planner report emails. You can configure the Reserved Instance Recommendations report to send emails. For more information, see Running and Scheduling Reports.

Immediately after upgrading to version 8.5, a task will run in the background to migrate billing data. You can see this "Upgrade Billing Records" task in the Commander Task tab at the bottom of the console. During this brief data migration period of under an hour, billing retrieval will be delayed, and data in the cost and Service Portal dashboards won't be accurate. After billing data migration is complete, all billing tasks, such as the Cost Analytics Dashboard and billing reports, will return to full functionality.

Deprecations and removals

These are the deprecations and removals for version 8.5.0. For additional hotfix deprecations or removals, see the Release Notes.

Removed

  • Advanced filter “Guest OS” has been removed from the filter options of the Cost Analytics dashboard.

Deprecated

  • Support for vSphere 6.0 has been discontinued.
  • VM Billing Report for Public Clouds: You can use the VM Billing Report for private cloud environments; however, for public or hybrid cloud environments it's recommended that you use the Cloud Billing Report. The ability to use the VM Billing Report for public clouds will be removed in a future release.
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012: Support for Commander installations on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012 has been removed as of Commander version 8.1.
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2012: Our support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 now requires SP4 as of Release 8.1. However, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 support is now considered deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
  • End of Life Policy, Suspect Policy, and Approval Policy and the relevant VM states.

Resolved issues

  • 18373 An error no longer occurs when retrieving billing data for an AWS cloud account that does not have any VMs.
  • 18357 An error no longer occurs when you try to add an AWS cloud account with an Assume Role or an IAM role.
  • 18347 Commander now retries retrieving billing data for Azure accounts when a recoverable error is encountered.
  • 18181 If tag synchronization is enabled for a public cloud account and you edit a custom attribute, the Commander UI will no longer become unresponsive while the tags are being synchronized.
  • 18127 If tag export is configured for a cloud account, custom attributes can now be set as expected on stacks that don't have any instances.
  • 17932 The Available VMs and Templates dialog now has a horizontal scroll bar when there are folders or resources with long names.
  • 17885 Storage costs are now excluded from the potential savings in power-scheduling recommendations. For VMs and instances, you pay 100% of the storage costs regardless of their power state.
  • 17879 In the Service Portal, you can now search for the VM property "File Location".
  • 17723 REST v3 API calls that are filtered with the cloud_account_id property now return the correct results.
  • 17515 You can now use the POST /webservices/services/rest/v2/vms/{id}/action/applyapproval endpoint of the REST API v2 to change the approval state of a VM from Unapproved to Approved.
  • 17489 Commander now provides a clear resolution for an IP pools conflict in cases where the source VM is "unknown".
  • 17446 The Microsoft Hyper-V Adapter service now starts as expected for SCVMM cloud accounts.
  • 17425 VMs that are no longer in inventory are now excluded when counting group members.
  • 17292 For a custom attribute that has the "Applies to: Services (VMs, Virtual Services, etc.)" option selected, a REST API v2 GET request no longer returns an UNKNOWN value in the list of object types, so the response can also be used in a PUT request correctly.
  • 17258 Multi-cloud templates for Amazon Machine Images (AMI) with multiple disks now deploy as expected.
  • 17222 When resources in AWS Auto Scaling groups are processed and invalid references or properties are encountered, errors are now logged and the cloud account stays connected.
  • 16513 When running Cloud Migration Planner reports on Azure and GCP with the Current Location set to a region that uses managed storage, the projected costs in the report now include Storage costs. As of version 8.4, the VM Comparative Economics report was renamed to the Cloud Migration Planner report.
  • 16271 When adding a new Azure service catalog item, the Default Value in the Instance Type field is no longer a deprecated instance type.
  • 16212 The VM snapshot size that's displayed in the Manage Snapshots page no longer varies in value between Commander and vCenter.
  • 15838 For private clouds, estimated historical costs are now calculated based on VM uptime if the settings for "Only While Running" are specified in the VM Uptime page of the Cost Model.
  • 2209 In the Service Portal, there is no longer an option to add a disk if the Display Storage Tier setting is not enabled on the component form.
  • 2185 Datastore scans for VMware cloud accounts now work as expected.
  • 1595 The Service Portal Reports page now shows links to shared Commander reports, even if the report isn't linked to a report template in Commander.
  • 1590 A new system property, embotics.log.directory, has been introduced to specify an additional directory to save log files. The diagnostic bundle will then include files that are in that directory, as well as in the default location - catalina.home/logs.
  • 1519 When all IPs are assigned to VMs in the Service Portal, a new service request to the IP pool now shows that a deployment destination isn't found, instead of displaying an inaccurate IP pool name.

Known issues

These are the known issues for version 8.5.0. For additional hotfix known issues, see the Release Notes.

  • 18280 The estimated license cost for an Azure SQL VM incorrectly displays the license cost on the SQL Server. It should display the license cost on the VM that the SQL Server is running on. Note that the actual costs for an Azure SQL VM are correctly displayed.
  • 21870 When you deploy the VM Access Proxy, the Synchronize guest time with host option is disabled.

    Workaround: In vCenter, right-click the VM Access Proxy deployment and select Edit Settings. On the VM Options tab (the Option tab in the Thick Client), enable the Synchronize guest time with host option in the VMware Tools panel.

  • 16002 When the WebMKS console connection method is configured, Internet Explorer 11 users may be unable to see the mouse pointer in the console session.

    Workaround: To open a console to a Windows VM from Internet Explorer 11 when using WebMKS, try enabling mouse trails with the shortest option. Or, use the VMRC plug-in method instead of the WebMKS method. For Linux VMs, use the VMRC plug-in connection method. See Console connection methods to learn how to change the console connection method for HTML5 browsers.

  • 9223 In some cases, when you attempt to generate a Cloud Billing report and use the Group By option of Cost Adjustments, the report will fail to generate.