Best Practices
- Distribute cost across VMs based on the achievable VM density of a cluster
The advantage to basing cost on cluster density is that it is static and representative of your virtualization capabilities. For example a cluster that has a VM density of 33 and carries a cost of $12K per year, would have $364 added to the cost of each VM (cost / density). If you base the cost on how many vms are running on the cluster at a given time the number will be dynamic and not representative of your virtualization capabilities (i.e If there is only 1 VM running on the cluster that VM would have $12K added to it.
When To Update The Cost Model
- When a clusters compute or storage resources are increased
- When VMs consuming a large amount of resources are provisioned or decommissioned
Calculating Cluster Density
This section describes best practices for calculating VM density for a cluster.
You can retrieve the density per cluster in the vCommander console [Views > Operational > (select the cluster) > Summary]
On the summary page you will need to add the Number of VMs value and the VM capacity remaining value to calculate the VM density of the cluster. In the example below the density of this cluster is 33.
Implementing Custom Cost
This section demonstrates adding additional costs to a service catalog item. The example used in the steps below uses flat rates for providing backup services for a single VM.
To implement custom costing we will:
- Create a custom attribute
- Add the custom attribute to the cost model
- Associate a cost to the attribute
- Apply the attribute to the Service Catalog item
Creating Custom Attributes
Custom attributes can have multiple values and a unique cost for each value. In this example we will have a custom attribute called Backups with the values "1H RPO" and "24H RPO"
1. Edit the cost model [Configuration > Cost > Cost Models]
2. On the custom section select "create new custom attribute"
- Type set to List
- Applies to Services
- Optional un-check "Service Portal users can set custom attributes if their role has permission to set custom attributes."
3. Click "Next" and add the allowed values for each attribute then select "Finish"
Associating Costs to Custom Attribute Values
1. From the Custom page on the Edit Cost model screen select the new attribute from the drop down list and select "Configure"
2. Configure the cost to be added for each option
3. Repeat for each custom attribute you have created, once all custom attributes are added and configured, select finish
Applying Custom Costs To Service Catalog Items
1. You will now need to set the custom attribute values on your service catalog items [configuration > service request configuration]
2. select "Edit" on the service catalog item
3. For each component in the blueprint select the attributes tab, then select "add attributes"
4. Select the attributes you configured for the cost model
5. Set each attributes value
6. Once all attributes have been assigned a value select "Finish"
7. When a service that has these custom cost attributes configured is requested form the service portal the cost breakdown, including the custom attributes cost will appear on chart.
For more complex calculated costing please refer to this article on the online documentation below: