VM Chargeback
VM sprawl and over allocated resources are common ailments in virtualized infrastructures. Providing cost visibility helps business users understand the cost of virtual infrastructure. With this understanding, behavior can be modified to properly allocated resources.
vOPS Overview Video
VMs Are Not Free
Virtualization admins many times find that business units have requested VMs that are not needed and struggle to fight internal perceptions that VMs are free from business groups outside the IT team. Other administrators, such as those working for hosting services providers or private cloud implementations, must find a way to quickly and easily produce cost figures to bill for IT resource usage. VMs generate expenses as they:
- Consume allocations of CPU, memory, and storage from physical hardware
- Require an operating system license, vSphere licenses for VMware environments based on allocated vRAM, and potentially additional application software licenses
- Must be patched, maintained and kept current to enterprise standards
Easily mapping costs from customers to IT usage to show business units and application owners the expenses that their VMs are incurring is not a trivial task. Without a chargeback solution that can also integrate data into billing and financial systems, significant manual accounting using spreadsheets and exports of data from VMware vCenter or Microsoft Systems Center is necessary.
Effective Virtualized Environment Cost Mapping Requires Thorough VM Profiling
vOPS Reporting & Chargeback, part of the VKernel vOperations Suite, is a powerful, easy to use and affordable product that enables IT managers to accurately map VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization costs to applications, hardware usage and users. Using the patent pending Capacity Analytics EngineTM, vOPS Reporting & Chargeback enables VM admins to generate basic financial reporting than can be used in Hyper-V or VMware chargeback, show-back or IT budgeting discussions with application, financial or capacity management teams.
Installed as a virtual appliance, vOPS Reporting & Chargeback provides value within 20 minutes from download by:
- Calculating allocated and actual computing resource costs for Hyper-V and VMware VMs
- Allowing for customizable CPU, storage and memory costs with tiered pricing of server and storage hardware usage
- Allowing for VM cost overrides for VMs as specified by administrators
- Allowing for Business View creation and automatic synchronization with the Systems Center and vCenter folder structure to group VMs with applications and business units
- Allowing for custom chargeback fields for regularly-occurring additional costs such as data center space rental, licenses, and power
- Stack ranking all VMs in an environment in order of operational cost
- Enabling automated reporting that can be emailed out in PDF, CSV or XML format
- Allowing for chargeback data integration into external systems such as billing applications
vOPS Reporting & Chargeback enables organizations to curb VM sprawl, improve budgetary planning, provide business context to rightsizing recommendations, and bill for resource allocations and usage. vOPS Reporting & Chargeback is simple to download, easy to deploy and provides immediate measurable value.
