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Is VMware’s new vCenter Chargeback dead on arrival? At its current list price of $750 per managed processor, it may well be. Even though some VMware users understand how Chargeback could help them better utilize resources and reduce sprawl, its price tag will make it a hard sell.

“At $750 per processor, there’s no way in heck I could get management to sign off on what’s basically improved power and cooling,” said Kent Altena, infrastructure architect at Farm Bureau Life Insurance Co. (FBL) in West Des Moines, Iowa.

Altena oversees about 45 VMware ESX hosts running 750 virtual machines, and he has been thinking about ways to push application owners to shut down test and development virtual machines when they’re done with them. FBL currently bills project owners for virtual machines by taking the total cost of a server and calculating the virtual machine’s (VM’s) share of the resources — especially memory. “It works great,” he said, “but it doesn’t give them a model to turn their VMs off. Ever.”

I was reading through a few articles on techtarget and found this one. It’s something that I’ve been discussing more recently, not just in virtualization, but in terms of systems management, actually as a result of a conversation with an IT manager working for a medium business, he’d been complaining that “the price is coming down but everything is extra, even the things that you thought would be included”, and he has a point. As vendors and service providers (not to mention end users), we need to manage expectations, we need to consider not only the marginal cost, but the overall cost, only last week I got a call from a friend working over at a manufacturing business who was asking “did you know that monitoring databases is extra now using…. it was standard in the old version.”.

Going forward it’s an interesting debate, what vendors have to appreciate is that as we deploy more infrastructure, be it physical or virtual, that the marginal capital and support investment doesn’t necessarily increase, that £35 per server for asset management might not be a deal on 10 servers, but as we scale that up it starts representing a significant investment for what could be seen as a hard sell internally – remember that IT is typically seen as a cost. I remember being in a meeting with a business manager who was horrified when he discovered that everything was monitored but not down to the hardware level, “but I thought that had been done he said”, but there’s no budget replied the CIO, you wouldn’t sign it off, “that’s an IT cost was reply”,  as more and more shared infrastructure, shared platforms and virtual environments, how do we manage the customer need for everything to be an IT cost whilst IT manage to deliver at cost? Let us not forget that often chargeback can simply be an average percentage of the IT spend divided by the number of servers, if we took our true costs down to their component parts, how many systems would be ‘off the domain’, not in the backups, running on desktops with a per application configuration and a lack of documentation?

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