A Cost of a Virtual Server

[Fergieman201110]

Guys

More of general question.

a lot of companies project in my company generally require some sort of server for hosting a service.

since the move to virutal , project managers now no longer include any costs for hardware as they think it's all free.

as a result we have lots of managers requesting new servers without any thoughts to the costs.

by and large the major factor i have is trying to get a cost to a vm server , based on its hard disk usage , ram and cpu.

I would like to be able to charge back a new vm to said department/project manager so that they are aware of this.

san space isn't unlimited.

not sure if this is the correct forum for this type of question , but what is everyone's experience with this and how to they manage and adminstrate it?

Cheers

F

[vmroyale]

Note: Discussion successfully moved from VMware ESXi 5 to Enterprise Strategy & Planning

Not sure if this is really the correct forum either.

I've seen people just create a cost sheet, based off of the real numbers. In other words - A server has a cost, its processors have a cost, and its memory has a cost. Storage (and different tiers of storage) have costs, DR has cost, BC has cost, SLAs have costs, etc. You can build out a matrix of these costs and let the "customers" pick what they want a la carte style for their VMs similar to the same way they would have spec'd out a physical server in the past. Just like then, you still get what you pay for.

Good Luck!

[jfrappier]

You should determine the cost of a VM - there are several factors:

- Data center / co-location costs which may include electricity and bandwidth but if that doesnt you should factor those costs as well.

- Storage / SAN costs.

- Software licensing costs for VMware and your guest OS' (Windows, Linux, CALs, Databases, etc...)

- Backup costs

- Server administration costs

- Network, firewall and other physical costs

[Linjo]

Maybe have a look at VMware vCenter Chargeback:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-chargeback/overview.html

// Linjo