Understanding and controlling costs is regarded as one of the most difficult aspects of IT. The new vCloud Automation Center offers an accurate view of infrastructure costs and a more accurate model for assigning prices to services being offered.
Regardless if companies are actually charging for private cloud resources or not, most companies want to provide cost information to the business groups they support. The objective is to make resource consumers more aware costs in order to start influencing consumption behavior. This is the first step towards actual chargeback implementation. New capabilities in ITBM Standard edition make it easier for IT administrator’s to setup and implement cost transparency in vCloud Automation Center as well as compare internal costs to service offered by public cloud vendors.
Understanding the cost of your services
vCloud Automation Center provides cost transparency throughout the product as well as chargeback reporting. Administrators define costs for the physical compute resources in their infrastructure. Resource costs are then proportionally allocated to each virtual machine based on the cpu, memory, and storage resources consumed as well as costs associated with the machine or application.
Most companies know how much they paid for their physical compute resources. However, very few can easily come up with the fully burdened cost including software, maintenance, administration, space, power cooling, etc. The challenge has been how to calculate the fully burdened costs and then populate the vCloud Automation Center cost profiles needed to enable cost transparency and chargeback reporting.
In this release, vCloud Automation Center leverages the cost reporting and management capabilities of VMware’s IT Business Management (ITBM) Standard Edition to auto populate cost profiles with accurate costing information. ITBM contains a comprehensive knowledgebase of cost information from the leading infrastructure providers as well as industry data used to create a fully burdened cost model. Users can modify this information to reflect their discount structures and unique environment variables. Using the hardware configuration information discovered by vCAC, ITBM can assign costs to those physical resources. This integration simplifies the process for understanding infrastructure costs and developing a more accurate model for assigning prices to the services being offered.
Comparing your cost to public cloud offerings
ITBM Standard Edition, not only helps companies better understand the cost of their private cloud offerings, it also helps compare those costs to similarly configured offerings available from public cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. With this information, administrators and make better decisions about when to leverage public cloud resources vs. delivering services internally.
Learn more about vCloud Automation Center and how automating cloud service delivery can save cost while accelerating access to IT applications and resources.
- Watch the ITBM Standard Edition Overview Video (5:22 min)
- Watch the vCloud Automation Center Overview video (2:30 min)
- See how VMware IT saved 90% of time spent and 30% of costs through automated provisioning.
- Check out what some of our customers are saying in the customer case studies on our web site.
Need help deploying your private cloud infrastructure or developing your business justification? Contact us and our experts can help your team build the business case and the solution that will maximize your IT productivity. Follow us on Twitter: @vmwarecloudauto. Subscribe to the VMware IT Management blog for exclusive content and updates.
