VMware Product Alignment

vCenter Chargeback – End‐to‐end cost reporting solution for virtual environments that leverages integration with vSphere and vCloud Director.

VMware IT Business Management Suite – Set of SaaS business applications that automate key processes for IT business management. Through its proactive planning, billing, and cost optimization capabilities, ITBM provides the visibility and predictability that enables stakeholders to improve value and align spending with business goals. It also automates the core financial processes needed to easily plan, charge, and optimize the cost and value of IT. The ITBM suite includes:

IT Costing – Maps the connections between IT services and their underlying cost drivers using an intuitive graphical approach that enables total cost of ownership (TCO) and unit cost tracking.

IT Demand Management and Budget Planning – Facilitates accurate, fact-based IT budgeting, planning, and forecasting.

IT Showback and Chargeback – Gives business units visibility into IT costs and alternatives, including full itemized billing and chargeback.

IT Cost Optimization – Automatically identifies potential areas for ongoing cost reduction, such as candidates for virtualization and consolidation, storage tiering, SLA reduction, end of life, deferral of upgrades, and support reduction.

Vendor Manager – Provides a control and optimization mechanism for vendor agreements that proactively governs contractual commitments.

SLA Manager – Sets, tracks, and reports on SLAs, key performance indicators (KPIs), and key value indicators (KVIs) for services, vendors, and customers, and performs root cause and business impact analysis at all levels.

vCenter Chargeback collects virtualization and vCloud cost data by integrating with vSphere and vCloud Director. It then provides cost data to the ITBM suite for inclusion in cost models.

Both products are connected by the vCenter Chargeback Connector, which scans vCenter Chargeback for a specific hierarchy and creates a report schedule to generate cost reports for this hierarchy on a daily basis. The connector also retrieves both generated and archived reports and provides the cost data for each virtual machine in the hierarchy to the IT Business Management Suite.

Based on the cost data collected by the connector, the IT Business Management Suite populates detailed analysis reports in its cost model and CIO dashboard. This integration provides visibility to CIOs across all IT assets and enables them to easily identify cost reduction opportunities by comparing virtualization, vCloud, and physical costs.

The ITBM Suite provides out-of-the-box (OOTB) cost models. A cost model is a multitiered set of allocation rules that map the financial relationships from the general ledger up to the business units within the organization. The relationships reveal which entities drive the cost of other entities.

The cost browser provides a simple way for users (typically the IT finance administrator) to create and modify a cost model that defines the cost relationships in their business structure. Cost models can be modified periodically by adding or deleting elements and changing dependencies to reflect the current contributory relationships between cost object types.

The OOTB cost model does not necessarily reflect all financial aspects of a fully mature IT organization. Rather, it provides immediate value to typical IT organizations, and introduces design guidance for object types and common allocation rules that are used to allocate cost end-to-end from the general ledger to the business units. If needed, the model can be enhanced to reflect any organization cost structure and data sources.

Using the ITBM Suite, the customer gains unprecedented visibility and transparency across all IT components (physical, virtual, and vCloud). The ITBM Suite enables automatic tracking and processing of IT cost and service data across the organization. ITBM dashboards provide a 360-degree view of what IT services cost to deliver and the service levels that are provided. This visibility enables IT to run like a business and enables IT executives to make fact-based decisions.