VMware ^® vCenter™ Chargeback Manager™

VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager provides you with the ability to gain visibility into VM costs and to gain chargeback accountability for virtual machine self-service based on organizational units and resources managed within VMware vCenter Server.

Configure VM pricing models to meet your organization’s unique structure, needs, and policies

• Customized chargeback hierarchy. Define how virtual machines and VMware vSphere hosts are assigned to and shared by different departments, cost centers, or business units in an organization.
• Reusable cost templates. Standardize the process of adding pricing models to VM’s with cost templates. Templates can be used to rapidly apply existing models that have been set up to expanding or new environments.
• Flexible billing policies. Implement fixed costs, allocation-based costing, utilization-based costing, or a combination based on the chargeback maturity of your organization.
• Flexible non-variable costs. Allows for entry of non-variable cost structures to model the realities of a datacenter environment.
  • 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).
  • One-time costs. Implement one-time costs that are charged at the time of VM creation to account for relevant overhead
  • Overage fees. Empower users to utilize resources beyond their reserved amounts with premium base rate pricing
  • Cost distribution. Associate costs to virtual infrastructure entities in the hierarchy. Share costs of a virtual machine across different business departments.
  • Currency selector. Define cost metrics in different currencies for global enterprise-wide chargeback.
• Guest operating system costs. Allows for configuring the guest operating system costs as one-time costs in the pricing model

Gain IT cost visibility with simplified analysis and reporting.

• Cost reports. Generate summary and comparison reports of costs and resource usage for specified periods of time. In addition, generate enhanced reports with attribute based reporting, cost variance over time, showback report templates.
• Customizable report templates. Customize header, footer, logo, title, etc. to fit company or business unit brand standards.
• Report delivery. Archive, schedule, email, and export reports (Word, PDF, CSV). Reports can also be delivered and viewed using a web browser.
• Most Expensive VMs Report. Understand the largest contributors to your datacenter environment’s costs to drive and prioritize efficiency efforts.
• Enterprise-wide management across multiple vCenter Servers. Single chargeback hierarchy and support for reporting across an entire datacenter cluster.
• Stop report generation as required. vCenter Chargeback Manager enables you to stop and delete any running report.

Enable end user accountability for VMs in a self-service private cloud environment.

• Meter resources in vCenter Server. In addition to standard resource metering (e.g. CPU, Memory, Storage, Network), additional capabilities include thin/thick provisioning, raw disk mapping, and tiered storage.
• Meter resources managed in VMware vCloud Director. Charge for broadband network traffic, public IP addresses, and other services (e.g. DHCP, NAT, firewall) provisioned in VMware vCloud Director in addition to standard CPU, Memory, and Storage metering. Additionally you can meter VPN tunneling and fast-provisioned linked clones.
• Automated VMware vCloud Director chargeback hierarchies. Gain immediate visibility into vCloud Director organization, virtual datacenters, and vApps with automated creation of chargeback hierarchies.
• Support VMware vCloud Director resource management models. Enable pay-as-you-go, reservation pool, and allocation pool charging for resources in VMware vCloud Director
• Support new VMware vCloud Director capabilities. Includes elastic vDCs, independent disks, and storage classes.
• Email notification for system health. Configure the alert notification settings in vCenter Chargeback Manager to receive email notifications on health of the system.

Abstract and pass data into management applications for fact based decisions

• Integration with VMware vCenter Operations Suite. Leverage vCenter Operations resource usage analytics to provide 1) visibility into cost savings from optimizing virtual resources and 2) budgeting decision support with cost forecasting.
• Integration with IT Business Management Suite. Leverage Chargeback Manager cost visibility for the virtual/cloud environment to achieve end-to-end IT cost visibility in the IT Business Management Suite.

Manage vCenter Chargeback Manager through various interfaces.

• Integration with VMware vSphere Client. vCenter Chargeback Manager 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 Manager 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.
• Programmability. Leverage CBM APIs and vCenter Chargeback Manager SDK for Java - v2.0.0 to enable integration with 3rd party tools.