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VMware vCenter Chargeback™

Model, Measure and Assign Costs Associated with Virtual Machines

Get accurate cost measurement, analysis and reporting with VMware vCenter Chargeback, part of the VMware family of management products. Create cost transparency and accountability so business owners and IT 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.

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

Key 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 [View More]
  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 [View More]
  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)
  • Base rates. Define base rates associated with metered elements (e.g. CPU, memory, disk, disk I/O or network I/O)
  • 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 [View More]
  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 [View More]
  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 [View More]
  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.