by Craig

Installing vCenter Chargeback (Part 1)

Vmware

I decided to, once again, try my hand at the vCenter Chargeback installation and configuration to try and gain some cost control over our virtual estate. To that end this post, and hopefully others, will comprise my successful deployment of the software against our environment.

The environment

The environment I am working against has a physical vCenter server, a physical database server and the rest is mostly virtual machines.

Deployment

The Oracle database has already been built so it is simply a case of connecting in the new virtual Chargeback server (Windows 2008 VM) to the database. Oracle Client Installer - Installation type

To install the oracle client I downloaded the 11.0.2 win64 onto the 2008 server (as they are both 64 bits) and choose to use runtime as the installation type.

This gives me all the connectivity I need without too many superfluous administration tools that are already present on the database server. Oracle Client Installer - Installation Location    

Next up is the location of the oracle client. This is mostly up to you but the settings i used are as per the image; c:\oracle.         Having installed the client you need to use Oracle Net Configuration Assistant to connect you into the database and create your tnsnames.ora file. This is something anyone who has ever used oracle should have done many times before and there is nothing different about this one.  

Oracle user, tablespace and permissions

So these are the bits that i had to work out and most people will be interested in (those of you that are used to Oracle)

Creation of the tablespace (having logged on as system): 

create tablespace CHARGEBACK datafile 'c:\\ora_data\\vccore01\\vccore01\\chargeback.dbf' size 200M EXTENT MANAGEMENT LOCAL AUTOALLOCATE;
Creation of the user/schema, of course change for whatever you want to use as the password: 
create user chargeback identified by <password> default tablespace chargeback temporary tablespace temp;
Finally the permissions that need to be applied to the user/schema “chargeback” in order for it to work! (These might be slightly over the top and i would hope to refine them with a few more hours of experimentation):

grant connect to chargeback; 
grant create view to chargeback; 
grant create procedure to chargeback;
grant create table to chargeback; 
grant create sequence to chargeback; 
grant create any sequence to chargeback; 
grant create any table to chargeback; 
grant create type to chargeback; 
grant unlimited tablespace to chargeback; 
grant create session to chargeback; 
grant drop any table to chargeback; 
grant CREATE ANY CLUSTER to chargeback; 
grant DROP ANY CLUSTER to chargeback; 
grant CREATE ANY INDEX to chargeback; 
grant DROP ANY INDEX to chargeback; 
grant CREATE ANY SYNONYM to chargeback; 
grant DROP ANY SYNONYM to chargeback; 
grant CREATE ANY VIEW to chargeback; 
grant DROP ANY VIEW to chargeback; 
grant CREATE DATABASE LINK to chargeback; 
grant CREATE PROCEDURE to chargeback; 
grant CREATE ANY TRIGGER to chargeback; 
grant DROP ANY TRIGGER to chargeback; 
grant CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW to chargeback; 
grant CREATE ANY DIMENSION to chargeback; 
grant DROP ANY DIMENSION to chargeback; 
As **SYS**: execute on dbms_lock;

Having done all that you should now be in a position to start the installer and run through the wizard to install the vCenter Chargeback.

Most of the installation of Chargeback itself is covered by the documentation and i would advise following that rather than this web page, it doesn’t have any “eccentricities” that i am aware of…

Next up will be the install (maybe) and then the configuration of Chargeback.