2.4 Metering and Service Reporting
For vCloud environments, resource metering and service reporting is essential for calculating service costs. This is also important to accurately measure consumer usage and shape consumer behavior through chargeback policies. Enterprises might not necessarily have the same cost pressures for an enterprise private vCloud as a public vCloud service provider. The requisite chargeback procedures or policies might not exist. An alternative to chargeback is showback, which tries to raise awareness of the consumption usage and cost without involving formal account procedures to bill the usage back to the consumer’s department.
The following table provides examples of workload virtual machine sizing and costing.
Table 7. Workload Virtual Machine Sizing and Costing Examples
Virtual Machine Type | Sizing | Storage | Cost Model |
Extra Large | 8 vCPU, 8GB RAM (can offer up to 32 vCPU and 1TB RAM) | 400GB | Provision Cost ($) | Operate Cost ($/mo) |
Large | 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM | 200GB | Provision Cost ($) | Operate Cost ($/mo) |
Medium | 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM | 60GB | Provision Cost ($) | Operate Cost ($/mo) |
Small | 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM | 30GB | Provision Cost ($) | Operate Cost ($/mo) |