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 for 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 accounting procedures to bill the usage back to the consumer’s department.

The following table provides examples of workload virtual machine sizing and costing.