vCenter Chargeback Manager is an end-to-end cost reporting solution for virtual environments that are using VMware vSphere. vCenter Chargeback Manager provides functionality to define unit costs and calculate the overall costs based on the actual usage or reservation of computing resources. 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 cost and usage reports.
vCenter Chargeback Manager runs on an Apache Tomcat server instance. Users interact with vCenter Chargeback Manager through a load balancer (Apache HTTP Server). vCenter Chargeback Manager connects to the vCenter Chargeback Manager database that stores application-specific information, such as the defined chargeback hierarchies, cost models, users, roles, and so on. The application interacts with the vCenter Server using VIM APIs and with the vCenter Server database through a data collector. The data collector communicates with the vCenter Server Database using JDBC.
vCenter Chargeback Manager 2.0 new features include:
- Automatic Report Scheduler
- Different methods to charge thin and thick provisioned virtual machines
- Cost variance and cost optimization
- “Showback” Reporting
- The ability to difine fixed costs based on virtual machine state
- Tier-based storage costing
- Support for raw device mapping
- Complete support for vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
- Partial support for IPv6
- VM Instance Cost support for all hierarchies in vCenter Chargeback Manager
- Support for burstable billing or 95th percentile billing for the external network traffic in vCloud Director
- Support for overage charging for org vDCs in the Allocation Pool model of vCloud Director
- New cost models and billing policies for vCloud Director
