vCD and Chargeback (long read, many Q's)

[andreaspa]

Hi there!

I've spent way too much time on trying to figure out how to do proper chargeback in vCD, and now I'm turning here for some help and insights.

First, a bit about our environment;

It's vCD 9.7 (latest build) running on vSphere 6.0/6.5/6.7, with NSX and all components. (we're unable to upgrade to v10 due to Veeam integrations)

vRealize Operations 8.0.1 with Tenant App 2.3 (plus hotfix for vCPU policy issue), and all the latest MPs.

We have a couple of different orgs that are running as test.

Now, I'm trying to figure out how to do billing/chargeback properly. So far, my experience with the Tenant App is horrible and I've found most things quite difficult to customize.

A couple of questions regarding pricing policies:

(I have reviewed the docs; Creating and Assigning Pricing Policies but to no luck..)

1) For charge periods we can choose Hourly, Daily, Monthly. How does this affect the billing? If I use Monthly as a period, how will the customer be billed for something that's only used for parts of the month; Only for the time consumed or for the entire month?

2) Guest OS Rate feels like it's made for licensing compliance, but it's not extensive enough to cover MS licensing scenarios (for example, it should be able to accept rates based on no of vCPU etc.). I guess there needs to be external computing as well done in order to do proper billing?

3) I'd like a base fee for a VM (for example, just having a VM should cost like €1 per month), should I set this as a CPU policy?

4) There's nothing dynamically for RAM - I'd like to have option to have one cost for hardware and one for VMware licensing since there is a cap on vmw licensing for 24GB on the VM, it's not fair to let the customer pay licensing here as well.

In terms of billing, the Bills leave quite a lot to wish for..

1) There's no mention on the amount of resources consumed for a VM/vApp. It only shows the currency amount to pay.

2) Storage billing is de-coupled from the VM, and there's no way to tell in the Bill what VM/vApp/Media etc that is consuming said resources

3) Why is all VMs represented in a vApp for billing? This is generally not something customers will see, so this is extra confusing for them.

4) Will it show deleted items as well - for example, if a customer creates a Vm, uses it for a couple of days, then deletes it?

I'd buy in to the above if there's an detailed report that easily could be attached to the bill, but so far all the report templates seems to miss in delivering this info.

Speaking of reports, here's some missing parts I've found as well.

1) There's no option to run reports for specific time periods.

2) It's hard to get one single report that customers can relate directly to the bill.

What are your thoughts on the chargeback provided by VMware? Are you using any third party services for this (if so - which ones?)?

/Andreas