8.6.0 Release Notes
Release date: 2021-04-20
Snow Commander Release Notes for version 8.6.0, covering new features, upgrade notes, deprecated and removed features, resolved issues, and known issues. To access release notes for previous releases, go to the Release Notes Archive.
What's new
Commander now offers the option to configure the currency of your costs. There’s a default global currency setting to display all cost data in the currency you choose. Commander and Service Portal users can override this global setting and choose to display their own custom currency.
You can now associate a currency to a cost model. Specifying currency in the cost model allows you to configure the currency for charging your private clouds and the currency for charging your extra costs/line items for public clouds.
You can now specify the currency of your costs in the Cloud Billing and VM Billing reports, so you can tailor the currency of these reports based on their location. For more information, see Cloud Billing Report and VM Billing Report. All other reports use USD costs.
For the report currency exchange rate source, you can choose between actual historical exchange rates and manual fixed rates. Actual historical exchange rates are provided by the European Central Bank. Historical costs are converted to your currency preference based on the exchange rate on those historical days. Estimated costs use the latest available exchange rate. With the manual fixed rate option, you can modify the exchange rate to customize it for each report. This is useful if you want to use a fixed exchange rate for monthly reports to customers.
With Azure Enterprise Agreement (EA) accounts, you must specify the currency of the billing data being retrieved from Azure. For more information, see Retrieving Azure Billing Data.
The new multicurrency feature also extends to Cost Dashboard costs, so your currency selection will be displayed in the Commander and Service Portal Cost Dashboards.
To help you better understand the costs you see, the services and resources in both Commander and the Service Portal are now displayed in your selected currency.
This release introduces the following improvements in Commander:
- Changes requests: Change requests are now configured and managed in Commander separately from new service requests. Separating change requests and new service requests provides a clearer management approach and better reflects the importance and utility of change requests.
Change requests are now located on a separate Change Request tab that's accessed from the Configuration > Self-Service menu. The Forms tab, where change requests were previously managed, now only provides access to new service request forms.
Access rights: You can now assign access rights to multiple cloud accounts or datacenters at once. As part of this improvement, we've removed the inventory tree on the Users' page and replaced it with a user details pane so you can quickly see information about a selected user's account, including access rights, roles, and organizations. For more information, see Assigning Access Rights to Administrative Users.
AWS databases: In Commander and the Service Portal, you can now view the number of virtual cores used by AWS databases. Knowing the number of cores used is important because it affects the licensing costs for databases. This visibility was already offered for Azure SQL databases.
Costing details for Azure SQL Servers: In Commander and the Service Portal, the costing details for Azure SQL Servers are now more accurately displayed according to whether you're viewing the database or VM components of the selected SQL Server.
If you select the SQL Server database, the cost details provided through the database summary page will only display the license cost for the database. Whereas, if you select the SQL Server VM, the cost details provided through the VM summary page will display costs for the VM, such as, hardware, storage, and support.
- Billing retrieval: Performance of the nightly Retrieve Billing Data task has been optimized to reduce the amount of time it takes to retrieve billing data.
To help further integrations and automation, the following new features are introduced in the Commander REST API:
- IAM Role and Availability Set: Retrieve the IAM Role property for AWS virtual machines and the Availability Set property for Azure virtual machines.
- Intelligent Placement: Configure placement priorities and multi-cloud templates for deployed services.
- Service and change requests: Retrieve service requests and change requests with separate endpoints.
- Command workflows: Schedule command workflows to perform actions on deployed virtual machines, virtual services, entire services, and cloud accounts.
- Events and tasks: Filter events by task ID.
- Database costs: View cost breakdown of Azure database instances.
- Cost model currency: View the currency that has been set in the cost model.
To get started, see Getting Started with the Commander REST API in the REST APIs Guide. To browse the API reference, see Snow Commander REST API.
Upgrade notes
You can upgrade to Commander version 8.6.0 from versions 8.0.x - 8.5.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 8.6.0 from a previous version will affect the following:
After the upgrade is complete, the Migrate Billing Records task will launch to migrate billing data to a new table format. The time to run the task may exceed an hour in large environments.
- Cloud Billing and VM Billing reports, and saved searches that were scheduled before upgrading to version 8.7 won't have parameters set for multicurrency, so after upgrading, the currency settings will default to USD. After upgrade, you can change the currency settings to any currency you choose. For more information, see Generate scheduled reports and Run and Schedule Saved Searches.
- Commander can work with currencies supported by the European Central Bank. If the default currency isn't one of these, then it will be defaulted to USD.
Deprecations and removals
These are the deprecations and removals for version 8.6.0. Any deprecations or removals encountered in subsequent 8.6 releases will be noted in the relevant release notes.
Deprecated
- 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.
- End of Life Policy, Suspect Policy, and Approval Policy and the relevant VM states are deprecated as of version 7.0.2 and will be removed in a future release.
Resolved issues
- 19714 You can import billing data with the REST API for a specified date regardless of the time zone set for the Commander server.
- 19656 Billing records are no longer created for a virtual machine when you use the REST API to import billing data with the virtual machine's remote ID.
- 19618 If
embotics.portal.networks.destinationlimited
is set totrue
, and a VM isn't associated with a deployment destination, no networks will be shown in the Service Portal Reconfigure VM Resources dialog except those already associated with a NIC.
Known issues
These are the known issues for version 8.6.0. Any known issues encountered in subsequent 8.6 releases will be noted in the relevant 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.
- 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.