Wednesday, December 28, 2011

vCenter Chargeback 2.0: Concept

1 Cost Model can only have 1 Billing Policy at a given time. You can change your billing policy as it is dated. For now, there is no view for you to easily see the past Billing Policy and their covered period.
1 Cost Model can only have 1 currency, and you cannot change it.

1 Cost Model can only have 1 Base Rates at a given time. You can change your base rates are it is dated.

On the above screen, the “Computing Resource” is controlled by the “Computing Resources” feature, under the “Settings” tab.
In this global settings, I have disable Disk Read and a few others. That explains why you only see them in the Cost Model dialog box.


1 Cost Model can only have 1 set “built-in” Fixed Costs. There is no “effective date” field here so I’m assuming it will be effective immediately, but your history is computed with previous method. Example, you charge HA $10 and make it Hourly on 1 Jan 2011. In 16 Jan 2011, you change it to Monthly but you do NOT prorate it. If you run a weekly report on 18 Jan, I am not sure what will be charged…
I call the above as “built-in” Fixed Costs as the fields are the same with the Fixed Cost fields. To refresh your memory, below are the Fixed Cost screenshots. All the fields are here, plus you have “effective date”. So this gives flexibility, but at the expense of complexity. You will need to map them manually, plus you need to be careful with your Currency as Chargeback does not provide currency conversion. All your costs have to be in 1 currency for a given report.

You will also notice that in the “built-in” Fixed Cost, there is “Guest OS” cost. This is a clever one, as you can’t specify it in the Fixed Cost section. You notice in the Fixed Cost screenshots above, there is no field called “Guest OS”. So to bill based on specific Guest OS, you need to specify it here.

Billing Policy is cost computation for the Computing Resources. It is how you calculate the cost. It is not dated, so changing it will change the billing policy with immediate effect.
In the above screen, please look at the memory resource. I’ve already highlighted it. If you know the difference between “size” and “allocation”, let me know. A VM might have 4 GB of vRAM, given 2 GB of reservation, and using 3 GB. So I’m not sure where the 4th attribute is for, especially since vCPU and CPU do not have 4 attributes. I suspect it has something to do with Transparent Page Sharing.




1 comment:

  1. If you know the difference between “size” and “allocation”

    >> "Allocation" is admin configured value; meaning admin can charge the user for some arbitrary memory value (other than size, reservation and usage). The memory "size" is VM's memory setting from vSphere.

    Please note that allocation needs to be set manually on the VM either through vCenter Chargeback Manager APIs or UI (makes sense as it is configured value).

    In case of vCenter Chargeback Manager's integration with VMware vCloud Director the memory allocation of a VM is synced from VMware vCloud Director.

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