VMware vCenter Chargeback

Overview:

VMware vCenter™ Chargeback, part of the VMware vCenter family of management products, enables accurate cost measurement, analysis and reporting. With vCenter Chargeback, create cost transparency and accountability so business owners and IT staff can understand the actual cost of the virtual infrastructure required to support business services. VMware vCenter Chargeback is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server and gives you the ability to map IT costs to business units, cost centers, or external customers – enabling a better understanding of how much resources cost and what can be done to optimize resource utilization to reduce overall spend on IT infrastructure.

Benefits

• Create a simple, flexible and accurate model for measuring costs in a shared IT services environment
• Make better resource utilization and allocation decisions by ensuring accurate measurement of the true costs of virtualized workloads]
• Help end users make informed decisions about service levels requested with better visibility of their associated costs

Accurately Measure and Analyze Costs of Virtual Machines

Make better resource utilization and allocation decisions by ensuring accurate measurement of the true costs of virtualized workloads.  Identify opportunities to reduce deployment of low-priority or under-utilized workloads that don’t justify their costs. Help the business make informed decisions about service levels with better visibility in to their associated costs.

Drive Transparency Between IT and the Business

• Allow the business to understand the cost of deploying and maintaining business services
• Eliminate the perception that virtual machines are “free”
• Drive better decision making and planning for infrastructure budget requirements

Simplify Cost Accounting for a Shared Virtual Infrastructure

• Accurately account for resource ownership across business units
• Automatically assign costs for usage of server, storage, and network resources
• Schedule and distribute reports on a periodic basis to communicate usage and costs to business owners

Use Comprehensive Datacenter Cost Modeling

• Track costs for power, cooling, real estate, software licenses, and maintenance associated with virtual infrastructure deployments
• Distribute costs for shared business services across organizational units
• Integrate with existing IT Financial Management or Asset Management systems for complete cost visibility across physical and virtual resources

 

 

Using VMware vCenter Chargeback:

VMware vCenter Chargeback enables administrators to deliver IT as a service with a simple, flexible and accurate chargeback model. Using Chargeback, administrators can:

• Create customized cost models and metrics. Flexible cost models allow IT to measure fixed costs, allocated costs, actual utilization or a mix of all three, tracking costs by business unit or group.
• Report on virtualization costs precisely. VMware vCenter Chargeback captures accurate cost metrics for virtual environments, giving you insight in to the true costs of provisioning systems. The detailed cost information can be used to help the business make better decisions about deploying IT resources. VMware vCenter Chargeback takes into account many different factors. These range from hardware costs (CPU, memory, storage, etc.) to additional elements such as power and cooling. VMware vCenter Chargeback can incorporate all of these variables to provide IT with comprehensive cost information for a virtualized environment, enabling charge back to individual business units and the business as a whole.
• Simplify billing and reporting. VMware vCenter Chargeback provides cost transparency for IT services by automatically creating detailed billing reports that can be submitted to business units within an organization. This provides business units with a clear view into resources consumed and their associated costs. Administrators can now transition the IT environment from a cost center to a value center.

How Does VMware vCenter Chargeback Work?

VMware vCenter Chargeback accurately identifies costs associated with virtual resources and automatically ties those costs back to the business. Chargeback maintains a database of cost and usage metrics gathered from VMware vCenter Server. Cost configuration is simple because Chargeback is integrated with the VMware vSphere™ 4 Client. A Web interface allows for ease of administration and reporting, with delegated roles for reporting access.

A Chargeback Hierarchy Makes it Easy to Create Chargeback Models

To begin using Chargeback, the administrator creates a chargeback hierarchy that provides the basis for determining cost structures and delivery of reports. The hierarchy can span multiple VMware vCenter Server instances for enterprise-wide chargeback. Costs can automatically propagate down the organizational structure or can be applied at the virtual machine level. Cost templates simplify and standardize the process of adding costs for virtual machines. Any number of cost templates can be created to support different cost structures across the organization.

Multiple Cost Models Provide Flexibility in Measuring Costs

Chargeback supports three different cost models:

• Fixed cost – Specific per virtual machine instance costs such as floor space, power/cooling, software or administrative overhead.
• Allocation-based costing – Variable costs per virtual machine based on allocated resources, such as the amount of memory, CPU or storage allocated or reserved for the virtual machine in VMware vCenter Server.
• Utilization-based costing – Variable costs per virtual machine based on actual resources used, including average memory, disk and CPU usage, network I/O and disk I/O.

Cost models can be combined in a cost template, making it easy to start with a simple chargeback model and align with organizational requirements.

Flexible Cost Accounting Uses Rate Factors to Capture Costs Accurately

Chargeback administrators can define base rates associated with metered elements (e.g. CPU, memory, disk, disk I/O or network I/O). Rate multipliers can be applied to different costing models at run-time, allowing IT to account for use of higher-end storage or servers, or higher SLAs (e.g. DR or backup included, production vs. dev systems). Metered elements that are not needed can also be easily disabled

VMware vCenter Chargeback Features:

VMware vCenter Chargeback is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server and gives you the ability to build flexible cost models based on organizational units and existing structures within vCenter Server .

The following is a listing of the key features of VMware vCenter Chargeback.

Chargeback Hierarchy Management

Easily associate VM's and costs to different departments, business units, and groups.

• Chargeback hierarchy. Map IT infrastructure to business structure for cost accounting purposes. Define how virtual machines and VMware ESX hosts are assigned to and shared by different departments, cost centers, or business units in an organization.
• Cost sharing. Associate costs to virtual infrastructure entities in the hierarchy. Share costs of a virtual machine across different business departments.
• Custom attributes. Specify custom attributes at any hierarchical level.

Cost Configuration

Define cost metrics related to virtual infrastructure resources.

• Cost templates. Simplify and standardize the process of adding costs for VM’s. Templates can be used to apply existing models quickly to expanding or new environments.
• Billing policies. Supports fixed costs, allocation-based costing, utilization-based costing, or a combination
• Cost accounting metrics. Allows for entry of cost accounting structures, base cost models, fixed costs, and multiple rates needed to calculate true costs.
  • Base rates. Define base rates associated with metered elements (e.g. CPU, memory, disk, disk I/O or network I/O)
  • Fixed costs. Add fixed costs to the hierarchy to account for non-compute attributes (e.g. software licenses, power/cooling, custom fixed costs)
  • Multiple rate factors / Rate multipliers. Account for use of higher-end storage or servers, or higher SLAs (e.g. DR or backup included, production vs. development systems).
• Currency selector. Define cost metrics in different currencies for enterprise-wide chargeback.

Data Collection

Monitor and measure costs associated with VM's.

• Automated utilization tracking. Built-in data collector collects usage and configuration data for computing chargeback costs.
• Temporal cost models. Track changing of cost parameters and policies with time.
• Chargeback database. Maintain a database of cost and usage metrics gathered from vCenter Server.

Cost Analysis and Reporting

Provide IT cost transparency with simplified billing and reporting.

• Cost reports. Generate reports containing cost and resource summaries over a specified period of time, or generate reports for comparing two different cost models.
• Customizable report templates. Customize header, footer, logo, title, etc. to fit company look-n-feel.
• Report delivery. Archive, schedule, email, and export reports (Word, PDF, CSV). Reports can also be delivered and viewed using a web browser.
• Enterprise-wide management across multiple vCenter Servers. Support for reporting across multiple vCenter Servers. Single chargeback hierarchy spans multiple vCenter Servers.

Management Interfaces

Monitor and manage vCenter Chargeback infrastructure.

• Integration with VMware vSphere Client. vCenter Chargeback is fully integrated as a vSphere Client plug-in, providing consistent look-n-feel and integrated capabilities for configuring costing model and viewing reports.
• Web interface. Allows for ease of administration and reporting, with delegated roles for reporting access.
• System health and troubleshooting. Monitor and troubleshoot the health of the vCenter Chargeback system through the built-in dashboard.
• Integration with Microsoft Active Directory. Base access controls on existing Microsoft Active Directory authentication mechanisms.
• Custom roles and permissions. Enhance security and flexibility with user-defined roles.

Documentation:

VMware vCenter Chargeback Data Sheet (.PDF)