4.2.2 Cost
The cost of maintaining catalogs and vApps after deployment from a catalog is an additional consideration. Media files and vApp templates consume disk space and have associated costs, as does the actual configuration of virtual machines, which consume compute resources within a vApp. Oversized virtual machines can artificially reduce the overall capacity of an organization virtual datacenter and also have an inherent cost, depending on the allocation model and charging strategy. Given these costs, consider the following:
Place
a catalog in an organization virtual datacenter
that uses lower-cost storage,
such as NFS.
Use
shared and published catalogs to minimize the number of duplicated vApp template
s and media files.
Depending on the specific catalog requirements, use
a catalog-only organization virtual datacenter, mapped to a lower-tier vSphere cluster that uses lower-cost datastores, or if using storage profiles, use a lower-tier storage profile
. Using a lower-tier vSphere cluster or a lower-tier storage profile helps provide cost-effective storage for catalog items. Reserve more expensive storage tiers to run workloads.