Chargeback Features

The Chargeback module offers a wide range of options to allow flexibility to match the application to your specific business requirements. The module allows for fixed-cost billing of consumed resources; it also accommodates any one-time costs that may be incurred. You can allocate cloud costs between multiple organizations or combine any of these options to suit the needs of the organization.

Cost modeling and templates are included in the Chargeback module; you can use them as is or customize them for your specific requirements. These cost models can be assigned to virtual machines or other services that are managed in the intercloud.

Extensive reporting capabilities are available that allow the operator to generate a wide variety of reports on costs, usage, and comparisons between objects. There is flexibility in generating the report outputs that allow for export to common file formats such as PDF, CSV, and XLS. There is also a neat feature that generates ongoing reports called Top 5. These reports show the top five highest VM charges, CPU costs, memory costs, and storage costs.

The Chargeback module also includes a web-based dashboard that presents the VM information and chargeback data in real time. This feature is customizable with the use of graphical widgets that monitor and analyze events that are then presented in a consolidated dashboard view in your web browser.

Chargeback Budget Policy

The budget policy feature allows a group or complete organization to be attached to a policy that collects and provides usage data and billing reports. The budget policy is the accounting mechanism in the Chargeback module.

In UCS Director with the Chargeback module installed, do the following to create a chargeback policy:

1. Select Administration ➢ Users And Groups from the top menu bar.
2. Click the User Groups tab.
3. Choose the group to apply the policy to and then click Budget Policy.
4. The dialog box for the budget policy will open, and the following fields will need to be filled out:
   1. Enable Budget Watch. When this box is selected, the group’s budget usage of the group is monitored. If this is not selected, then budget entries for this group are discarded.
   2. Enable Allow Over Budget. When this box is selected, the members of the group can exceed the assigned budget parameters. However, if you choose to assign a hard limit to usage, you can deselect this box, which will have the effect of halting all resource requests until a new budget is assigned by the operations staff.
5. When those steps are completed, click Save and exit.

Cost Models

Cost models are where you will create the costs of virtual resources and assign a value per unit consumed. Virtual resources include many different objects including CPU, RAM, networking, and storage units. By associating costs to each unit, you can use them as building blocks for the chargeback calculations. Costs are allocated to each unit to allow for maximum flexibility in creating a chargeback structure that is effective for any requirement.

To determine the cost of each individual virtual machine, the UCS Director Chargeback module determines the total units that are assigned to each VM and what the cost associated to each unit is. The module will poll, or query, the VM frequently to collect granular VM resource usage information. With the collected data from the VM, costs can be calculated for billing and reporting.

In addition to ongoing operational costs, additional costs can be defined and associated to a policy such as if the VM is being used in the cost to provision a VM. If you allow VMs to be reserved for future use, you can assign a cost to that as well. All of these objects and their values can be used to determine the cost associated with operating a VM.

You must define cost models in the chargeback application to specify what objects you want to include and what the associated cost of each unit will be.

To create a cost model, you use the UCS Director Chargeback module, and the steps to complete are as follows:

1. From the graphical interface, select Policies ➢ Virtual/Hypervisor Policies ➢ Service Delivery.
2. Select the Cost Model tab and click Add (+) to create a new policy.
3. The Cost Model dialog box appears.
   1. In the Cost Model Name box, enter the name of the cost model per your choice.
   2. In the Cost Model Description box, enter a short description of your cost model.
   3. In the Cost Model Type drop-down listing, select the type of cost model. Standard indicates a linear cost model, and Advanced indicates a package or script-based cost model.
4. In the Charge Duration drop-down list, select the time interval to measure VM usage. The options are as Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly. These total the costs based on the time window selected. In the Virtual Machine Cost Parameters option section, select Fixed Costs in local currency, one-time or up-front cost, which is usually the cost charged to provision and deploy the VM.
5. Define the hourly cost of both inactive and active VMs.
6. Use the CPU Charge drop-down list to apply costs based on either the CPU’s gigahertz speed or the number of cores. In this section, you can also define the charge for a reserved CPU and base the charge on the processor speed or the number of cores. The reserved cost is in addition to the VM cost parameters.
   To assign a cost based on actual CPU usage, use the Used CPU Cost field, which is based on the gigahertz speed of the CPU used per hour.
7. Use the Provisioned Memory Cost box to set the RAM/memory charged in gigabytes per hour. There are also Reserved Memory and Used options just as there are for CPUs; these are also charged in gigabytes-per-hour increments.
8. Define networking charges. The Received Network Data Cost box is the amount of ingress data that is also measured in gigabytes per hour. Ingress or egress data is charged in the same manner.
9. Set storage costs. Committed Storage Cost is the storage cost per gigabytes per hour. Uncommitted Storage is unused but available or provisioned storage that is also charged by gigabytes per hour.
10. The Tag Based Costs options are beyond the scope of the exam. These options allow you to select a tag-based model. Do so if you desire.
11. Use the Physical Server Cost Parameters options to define the currency desired. Next define the up-front or one-time cost for deployment of the server, the costs per CPU based on select metrics of either speed or number of cores, the cost per hour per unit, and the percentage utilization that is provisioned in the VM.
12. Set the Blade Server Costs parameters, such as whether a UCS B-series is a full- or half-slot server.
13. When completed, click Add (+) to save the cost model.

Chargeback Reporting

In this section, we will go over the process required to configure and generate the reports based on the collected data from the chargeback application.

The Chargeback module allows you to generate chargeback reporting on cloud usage and associated costs. The charges are based on the items you have defined. These resources include a wide variety of cloud computing objects and include used and unused resources.

Reports are generated based on your organization’s requirements and can include summaries for the current month, the previous month’s usage, and the cost details of individual objects such as usage of CPU, memory, network, or storage resources. The reporting output can be displayed in summaries, tab-based reports, and special widgets via the web-based dashboard. Since the chargeback summary data is stored in daily and monthly buckets, granular reports shorter than one week are not possible; the application offers only weekly and monthly reports.

1. To create a monthly resource accounting report, log into UCS Director and from the menu bar select Organization ➢ Chargeback.
2. On the left side of the GUI, select either a group or virtual data center (VDC).
3. Select the Resource Accounting tab.

The table created is the chargeback report for the group or VDC that you selected earlier.

To export the report, do the following:

1. Log into UCS Director and from the menu bar select Organization ➢ Chargeback.
2. On the left side of the GUI, select either a group or a virtual data center (VDC).
3. Select the Resource Accounting tab.
4. Select Export Report on the right side of the toolbar, and the Export dialog box will open.
5. Using the drop-down list, you can select the file format of the report; this can be PDF, XLS, or CSV.
6. Click Generate Report.

When the report is generated, you are offered the option to download the document.