vCloud Usage Meter – Relay mail via Office 365

Background

Starting with vCloud usage meter 3.6, there is a hard requirement that the appliance has to send email reports back to VMware. If like me, you run the usage meter in a ringfenced environment, you may consider routing the mail via the internet to Office 365. During my setup process though, I ran into some minor niggles, namely the ‘SMTP Relay Error 550 5.7.60 Client does not have permissions to send as this sender’  issue.

Solution

Let’s assume you have deployed the new vCloud usage meter appliance and logged into the web UI for the first time. The setup wizard will start and you will be greeted with the following message. Note there is no opt-out for sending data to VMware

On the provider tab, you have to enter your details. Fill in the e-mail address as the account you plan to relay through in Office 365. This is important as the vCloud usage meter uses this account as the from address! If it is not set as the email address, the email will fail to authenticate. I was not too fussed about the email account belonging to my organization’s domain so have stuck with a default OnMicrsoft address.

On the next screen, enter the details for the Office 365 SMTP service as below. Note the user set for authentication is set to the same e-mail address as on the provider tab.

In office 365 admin center, if you would like any email sent to this mailbox to be forwarded onto a distribution group, edit the settings of the user as below and click to edit the email forwarding option.

Set up the email address to forward to as below. You may wish to turn off the option to keep a copy of the email in the inbox.

Finally, you can configure email alerts for the appliance to send to the same mailbox. The to and from addresses need to be the same.

And that’s it, email should be working as expected.

Ian