VMTN Blog

Martin MacLeod is on a roll these days at Blade Watch. How to do chargebacks and resource accounting were huge topics the last two years at VMworld. Expect more from VMware on best practices for operationalizing your virtual infrastructure. How do you do chargeback? How do you account for slicing a big server into lots of little servers?

Link: Blade Watch » The cost of a virtual infrastructure.

Say I virtualize a DL380G4.  Now this bank depreciate their servers
over 3 years, the server is two years old, who pays the depreciation?
The application team are saying, well you’re taking the box of us, you
pay it, but then who owns the asset.  Can IT take this 380, and swap it
for a Proliant 5000 to get rid of some legacy hardware?

Also there was some internal debate about costs. Buying and paying
for a DL380G4 in the model above is easy, say it’s £6000 for the server
including all the bits, the software, the memory, the disks etc, that’s
£2000 a year (excluding support cost).  What is the cost of a virtual
server?  They’re currently having an emotional conversation with an
application team saying that their virtual server has 1 processor and
1GB RAM, therefore it should be cheaper than a server with 2 processors
and 1.5gb RAM. But do we really want to go that granular with our
charging?