VMware VCENTER CHARGEBACK 1.5

vCenter Chargeback User’s Guide

vCenter Chargeback 1.5

This document supports the version of each product listed and

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document, see http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs.

EN-000429-00

vCenter Chargeback User’s Guide

2 VMware, Inc.

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Contents

About This Book 5

1Introduction to vCenter Chargeback 7

What Is Chargeback 7

Chargeback Solution for Virtual Environments 7

Overview of vCenter Chargeback 8

2Installing vCenter Chargeback 11

Hardware Requirements 11

Software Requirements 12

Prerequisites for vCenter Chargeback 13

Download and Extract the vCenter Chargeback Installer 15

Install vCenter Chargeback 15

Create a vCenter Chargeback Cluster 19

Install vCenter Chargeback with an Existing Database Schema 22

Upgrading vCenter Chargeback 25

Services Related to the vCenter Chargeback Application 28

Accessing the vCenter Chargeback Application 29

Data Collector 29

Uninstall vCenter Chargeback 37

3Configuring Administration Settings 39

Activate the Application 39

Configuring Generic Settings 39

Managing LDAP Servers 42

Managing vCenter Servers 44

Managing Data Collectors 48

Managing the Application License 54

Manage Report View 55

Managing Attributes 57

Manage System Health Thresholds 58

4Authenticating and Managing Users, Roles, and Permissions 59

Resource Based Authorization in vCenter Chargeback 59

Permissions Defined in vCenter Chargeback 60

Managing Roles 61

Managing Users 66

vCenter Chargeback User Authentication 73

5Managing Chargeback Hierarchies 75

Creating a Chargeback Hierarchy 75

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Managing a Chargeback Hierarchy 78

6Managing and Configuring vCenter Chargeback Cost Elements 87

vCenter Chargeback Cost-Related Elements 87

Managing Cost Models 92

Managing Fixed Costs 96

Managing Cost Templates 99

Managing Billing Policies 101

Configuring Cost at the Entity Level 103

Physical Infrastructure Costing 105

7Generating Reports 107

About Reports 107

Generate a Cost Report 109

Generate a Usage Report 110

Generate Cost Comparison Report 112

Scheduling Report Generation 113

Managing Reports 118

Managing Archived Reports 121

Report Dashboard 124

8Monitoring System Health 127

vCenter Chargeback Events 128

9Administration Utilities 129

Database Password Change Utility 129

vCenter Chargeback Database Management Scripts 130

10 Troubleshooting vCenter Chargeback 133

Troubleshooting Utility 133

Troubleshooting Issues in vCenter Chargeback 134

Index 147

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About This Book

The vCenter Chargeback User's Guide provides information about configuring and using the chargeback solution

for virtual environments that use VMware Infrastructure or VMware vSphere.

Intended Audience

This book is intended for anyone who wants to install, upgrade, or use vCenter Chargeback. The information

in this book is written for experienced Windows or Linux system administrators who are familiar with virtual

machine technology and datacenter operations.

VMware Technical Publications Glossary

VMware Technical Publications provides a glossary of terms that might be unfamiliar to you. For definitions

of terms as they are used in VMware technical documentation, go to

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs.

Document Feedback

VMware welcomes your suggestions for improving our documentation. If you have comments, send your

feedback to [email protected].

Technical Support and Education Resources

The following technical support resources are available to you. To access the current version of this book and

other books, go to http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs.

Online and Telephone

Support

To use online support to submit technical support requests, view your product

and contract information, and register your products, go to

http://www.vmware.com/support.

Customers with appropriate support contracts should use telephone support

for the fastest response on priority 1 issues. Go to

http://www.vmware.com/support/phone_support.html.

Support Offerings To find out how VMware support offerings can help meet your business needs,

go to http://www.vmware.com/support/services.

VMware Professional

Services

VMware Education Services courses offer extensive hands-on labs, case study

examples, and course materials designed to be used as on-the-job reference

tools. Courses are available onsite, in the classroom, and live online. For onsite

pilot programs and implementation best practices, VMware Consulting

VMware, Inc. 5

Services provides offerings to help you assess, plan, build, and manage your

virtual environment. To access information about education classes,

certification programs, and consulting services, go to

http://www.vmware.com/services.

vCenter Chargeback User’s Guide

6 VMware, Inc.

Introduction to vCenter Chargeback 1

vCenter Chargeback is an end-to-end cost reporting solution for virtual environments using vSphere. Before

you install and start using vCenter Chargeback, an understanding of what chargeback is and about chargeback

solution for a virtual environment would be helpful.

This chapter includes the following topics:

n“What Is Chargeback,” on page 7

n“Chargeback Solution for Virtual Environments,” on page 7

n“Overview of vCenter Chargeback,” on page 8

What Is Chargeback

Chargeback is a mechanism to account for the operational costs involved in providing and maintaining an

IT infrastructure, including the costs for IT services and applications. Measuring resource utilization and

calculating the corresponding IT operational cost enables you to account for the IT resources utilized and bill

for the services provided.

In a non-virtual environment, a physical server and the associated resources like the applications running on

it can be easily mapped to the department using them, making the billing for such resource utilizations

relatively easy. Also, costs incurred due to maintenance and licensing can be directly associated to a

department, thereby enabling you to calculate the complete IT operational costs.

In a virtual environment, however, the task of calculating the IT operational cost for each department becomes

very difficult. Multiple virtual machines run on a physical server, which might be shared across different

departments or cost centers in an organization. As a result, resource utilization for this server and, therefore,

the cost incurred cannot be directly associated to any single department or cost center. The difficulty in

accounting gets further compounded when applications and services get shifted over time to different servers,

based on the load and available infrastructure resources.

Chargeback Solution for Virtual Environments

In a virtual environment, a chargeback solution requires a flexible metering system that can account for the

utilization of resources shared across the organization.

These measurements can be based on allocation or actual usage of individual servers and resources. In the case

of VMotion, DRS, or HA being enabled, the measurements could be based on the allocation or actual usage of

resource pools.

To support chargeback, the virtual environment and the chargeback solution must provide ways to measure

resource usage and associate the usage with a specific costing model. The chargeback solution must also

support the use of different costing models so as to charge the various departments or cost centers differently.

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A chargeback solution for a virtual environment defines a hierarchy with different types of entities such as

departments, divisions, business units, cost centers, physical servers, virtual machines, and so on. For each

entity type, a cost model is defined that determines the rate for each unit of a resource utilized. The chargeback

solution determines the resource usage by using either utilization-based metering or allocation-based metering

of virtual machines. The metered parameters are then associated with the designated entities, and the cost

model defined for that entity along with specific chargeback formulas are used as part of the overall chargeback

solution.

Overview of vCenter Chargeback

Determining the resource utilization and calculating the corresponding cost for a virtual environment that uses

VMware vSphere typically involves VMware professional services’ work or use of partner solutions. These

solutions are built using custom methods for VMware vSphere resource data collection and chargeback cost

calculation for organizations.

vCenter Chargeback is an end-to-end cost reporting solution for virtual environments that use VMware

vSphere. This Web-based application interacts with the vCenter Server Database to retrieve usage information,

calculates the cost by using the defined chargeback formulas, and generates reports. Figure 1-1 shows how

vCenter Chargeback interacts with various components of a virtual environment.

Figure 1-1. vCenter Chargeback in a Virtual Environment

vCenter

Chargeback

database

vCenter

Server

database

vCenter Server

VIM APIJDBC

Data Collector

vCenter Chargeback

Load Balancer

ESX

host02

ESX

host03

ESX

host01

vCenter Chargeback

vCenter Chargeback runs on an Apache Tomcat server instance. The user interacts with the vCenter

Chargeback application through a load balancer (Apache HTTP Server). vCenter Chargeback connects to a

vCenter Chargeback database that stores application-specific information, such as the defined chargeback

hierarchies, cost models, users, roles, and so on. The application also interacts with the vCenter Server and

vCenter Server database through a data collector. The data collector communicates with the vCenter Server

using VIM APIs and with the vCenter Database using JDBC.

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8 VMware, Inc.

When you install vCenter Chargeback, the vCenter Chargeback application, the load balancer, and the data

collectors are installed and run on the same machine. Although the vCenter Chargeback database can also be

installed on the same machine, in a real-world scenario you would install the application and the database on

separate machines.

vCenter Chargeback retrieves the virtual infrastructure inventory and the resource usage information for each

virtual machine from the vCenter Server database through the data collector. The data collector replicates this

information in the vCenter Chargeback database. vCenter Chargeback uses this information from the vCenter

Chargeback database along with the cost model and chargeback cost calculation formulas to generate the cost

reports. A single data collector instance can communicate with multiple vCenter Server instances and vCenter

Server databases and replicate the relevant information in a vCenter Chargeback database.

vCenter Chargeback also lets you create a cluster of vCenter Chargeback instances that share a single load

balancer. Each user request is routed through the load balancer. The load balancer forwards the request to a

vCenter Chargeback instance in the cluster based on the number request currently being serviced by each

instance in the cluster. All the vCenter Chargeback instances in a cluster are connected to the same vCenter

Chargeback database.

Chapter 1 Introduction to vCenter Chargeback

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vCenter Chargeback User’s Guide

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