Problem with Datastore Tier Rate Factors

[rookieadmin]

Hi all,

I have problem with Chargeback Datastore Tiers. I have three different datastore types and

I want to charge them seperately. To do this, I created three datastore tiers and moved that datastores to them.

For all three datastore tiers, I assigned different rate factors For example;

Datastore Tier 1 : 3.00

Datastore Tier 2 : 2.00

Datastore Tier 3 : 1.00

I expect to see different storage costs for VMs but nothing changes.

Then I moved all datastores to the folder ungrouped and assigned rate factors to datastores one by one according to tier structure.

After doing that I have got expected cost reports for some of the VMs but some of the datastores didn't reflect the rate factors to the cost report again.

What can the problem be? Is there any known issue for that?

If you can help me, I will be glad.

Best regards,

[HemanthPannem]

Hi,

There should not be an issue. Could you please let us know more details about cost configuration and report generation?

1. What is the duration of the cost configuration? (start time and end time).

2. What is the duration of the report generation?

The rate factors for datstores/tiers store historical changes as well as tier to datstore mappings also store historical changes.. If a datastore is part of a tier for some time, the rate factor of tier will be applicable for the datastore for that time. If its moved out of tier, the specific rate factor set on the datastore will be applicable.

For example, if a datastore is part of tier 1 from time lines t1 and t2.

and its in ungrouped from t2 to t3.

If you generate a report from t1 to t3, tier 1 rate factor is applied for t1 to t2 and datastore rate factor is applied from t2 to t3.

One thing to ensure that is you have not set any rate factors in the chargeback hierarchy for the VM or its ancestors.

The precedence order is

1. if a rate factor is set at VM level in the hierarchy for Storage computing resource, it will be taken.

2. If its not set on the VM, the ancestors are looked from the immediate parent to root of the Chargeback hierarchy.

3. If the both are not set, the datastore or tier rate factor is looked into based on whether datastore is tiered or not.

One more thing is to generate report using a cost model which has usage based billing policy.

Regards,

Hemanth

[rookieadmin]

Hi Hemanth,

Thank you for your response first.

You can find cost configuration details below.

Start time : 01-Jun-2012    End time : Infinite

And duration of the report generation as follows.

Start time : 01-Agu-2012   End time : 31-Agu-2012

Also the rate factor is 4.66 for the datastore which that VM uses.

Start of rate factor : 01-Jun-2012   End date : Infinite

As you can see from the image, some of the disks of VM ( disks C+D = 191 GB ) use rate factor 4.66 .

For exapmle disk E = 311 GB uses the rate factor 1.00 .

I want to point out something. One disk, in our example disk E, is Mapped Raw LUN and matches the size of disk E.

Maybe because of that, Chargeback uses the rate factor 1.00 to calculate the storage cost.

Best regards,

Ramazan

[HemanthPannem]

Hi,

Yes. That's right. For RDM, the LUN does not fall under any datastore. So, we don't use the datastore mapping for this disk.

Regards,

Hemanth

[dalidavila]

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem here, I configured the rate factor into the storage Tier profile at "infraestructure cost" option, and when I run a report at vDC level the rate factor is ignored and replaced with "1". but when i run the report at vapp level the rate factor that I did configured is used!!

Aaaaanndddd another tricky thing, When I run the report at vapp FOLDER level, the rate factor that I configured is considered, BUT! just for the first vapp inside of the folder, for the rest of them the rate factor that I configured is ignored and "1" appears again. 

What could be happening? Obviusly this behavior is not desired for my Allocation or Reservation customer vDCs. where the cost must be calculated for the total chunk of resorces at vDC level, not at vapp level.

Please anyone that have an Idea?