Overview Of Vcenter Chargeback - VMware VCENTER CHARGEBACK 1.5 Manual

vCenter Chargeback User's Guide
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.
vCenter Chargeback interacts with various components of a virtual environment.
Figure 1-1. vCenter Chargeback in a Virtual Environment
vCenter
Server
database
JDBC
Data Collector
vCenter
Chargeback
database
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.
8
ESX ESX ESX
host01 host02 host03
vCenter Server
VIM API
vCenter Chargeback
Load Balancer
vCenter Chargeback
UI
Figure 1-1 shows how
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