Our virtual and storage environment has seen dramatic growth in the past year and a half. As such we are being forced to look at how we handle our existing resources and how we bring in more. Like most IT departments our budget is typically meant to encompass all business units and account for their needs, as unpredictable as that can be. We are looking at implementing a department charge-back policy whereby a business unit can 'buy' ESX and storage resources. Money will never really change hands but its a matter of having a solid foundation for trackability and resouce usage/owner consumption documented and detailed for justification as resources are required in the future.
Our company provides web and data services to clients. When a project comes in we want that project's pricing to include the cost of the esx and san resources. I am looking at the best way to do this and software that will assist in the reporting of resource utilization and distribution.
For instance, all of our storage is Equallogic. Mostly 6000xv's but some ps6500e's as well. A SAN cost's us about 55,000 cdn. So if you figure out usable space divided by the cost its something like 1.30 / gigbytes there abouts. So say we put a price on storage at 1.50 dollars per gigabytes. Later the customer comes back and states they need more, I want to be able to record that in a software that will graph this growth over time based against a resource pool.
My second question is, what is a fair price to charge a customer for a VM? If say for instance a dual core, 8gb of memory server with a single disk was worth 3000. Would you charge 1500 for that vm? 1000? 500? Obviously you will scale the VM to lower resources then a physical server which pretty much comes with a minimum of 4-8gb ram and a quad core cpu now. So where do you factor in your price points? How do you determine how much to charge? A percentage of the ESX host's initial purchase price?
Im really interested in how others are handling.
