Recently I was queried on how to apply cost profile. I thought, it is super simple to do so. However when I tried in my lab, it took quite a while to find cost profiles screen and how does it work. While working on cost profile in my lab I realized few things. In this post I’m sharing how to use cost profiles and how it is related to compute resources, Fabric group.

You have to associate Cost profiles with compute resources. Compute resources is pool of clusters available in your endpoint. This is the single most thing I would like you to take as a learning from this post. Compute resource is in turn associated with fabric. There is direct relationship between compute resource and fabric. So when you create a fabric, you also carry along cost profile defined at the compute resource. Fabric admin creates reservation i.e. carves the chunk out of the fabric. Thus cost profiles get carried along. So cost profile applies to all the VMs created out of the fabric. Since it is fabric based operation, you need Fabric admin credentials to do this job.

Cost profiles are further divided into

1. Cost profiles –includes compute cost and storage cost.
2. Storage cost profiles –includes storage cost only and over rides storage cost used in cost profiles.

In other words, storage cost profiles and cost included in cost profiles are mutually exclusive

Cost profiles and Storage cost profiles are based on daily cost. So if you charge VM per month, you need to divide that cost by 30 days.

Cost profiles comprises of

1. Daily CPU cost
2. Daily Memory cost
3. Daily Storage cost

While Storage cost profile includes cost for storage alone. It is most useful when you have datastores of different characteristic and presented to same cluster.

Cost Calculation for Virtual Machines

Virtual machine cost includes cost profile + storage profile.

In most cases VM cost includes daily cost included in Cost Profile + Storage Cost Profile. But in case you wish to add software licensing cost you may to want to add blueprint cost with it. So over all this is how the VM cost would look like

One handy tip – starting vRA 6.1 you can put a currency symbol of your country. There are other features related to this but I think this is most relevant to this post.

Let’s go to the procedure of creating cost profiles

Creating cost profiles

Login to vCAC portal with Fabric Administrator credentials, in the infrastructure -> Compute Resources -> Cost profiles

Similarly you can create cost profiles for different environment as per your requirement. Keep in mind it is daily cost.Creating Storage Cost Profile, Procedure wise it is similarly to cost profile. So I’m not repeating it here.

Applying cost profile to Compute Resources

While in compute resource section, click on compute resource, select the cluster name, below name of my cluster is “cluster”

Click and Edit as shown above. You will be taken to default screen of Compute Resource Details as shown below

Go to Configuration tab, it is this place we need to associate cost profiles with Cluster and Datastore. You can create cost profile in this screen as well.

Associating storage cost profile with Datastore

In below screen I have only one datastore and I’m applying single storage cost profile to it. However storage cost profile is most effective when you have

1. Multiple datastores of different characteristic
2. Multiple cost profiles matching those characteristic

Now when you provision the VMs, you will see daily cost as highlighted below. This cost will vary as you increase CPU/Memory/Storage

In case, you want to charge customer for license deployed, you must associate that cost with the blueprint

Now you see difference in cost. Without blueprint cost, it is 240 INR and with Blueprint cost it is 25 INR more.

Currency of your country in Cost Profile

Finally I would like to share with you how to change the currency matching to your country. Browse to Infrastructure -> Administration

In Global properties, search for Core as shown below

To change currency for my country i.e. India I have changed the value to hi-IN

In case you want to see what is the value for your country go here

Conclusion

1. Cost profiles applies to cluster i.e. compute
2. Storage cost profiles applies to datastore and most relevant use case would be when you have different datastores with different characteristics
3. Cost profiles works on daily cost model. If you have monthly or yearly cost you must arrive at daily cost by dividing it by number of days
4. Cost profiles is most relevant to small and medium size business
5. It is not necessary to specify a cost value for all the resources, only the resources that you want to include in cost calculations.
6. Lease cost is calculated as daily cost multiplied by the total number of days in the lease period, if applicable. In case of lease cost model, it could be viewed as pay – as – you – go model only difference is, you pay upfront
7. Cost-to-date is calculated as daily cost multiplied by the number of days a machine is provisioned. Here the cost is calculated on daily basis.