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D A T A S H E E T

AT A G L ANCE

VMware vCenter™ Chargeback enables accurate 
cost measurement, analysis, and reporting of 
virtual machines. With vCenter Chargeback, line-
of-business owners and IT teams can gain visibility 

into the actual cost of the virtual infrastructure 
required to support business services. vCenter 

Chargeback provides the ability to map IT costs to 

business units, cost centers, or external 

customers—enabling a better understanding of 

how much resources cost and what can be done 
to optimize resource utilization. vCenter 

Chargeback also allows organizations to support 
policy-driven accountability for self-service 
environments so that business owners can “pay as 
they go” for IT resources. 

KE y B EN EFITS

• Improve resource utilization by gaining accurate 

visibility into the true costs of virtualized 
workloads.

• Enable line-of-business owners to have full 

transparency and accountability for self-service 
resource requests.

• Model infrastructure costs in a flexible way that 

fits organizational processes and policies.

VMware vCenter Chargeback

Gain Cost Visibility and Policy-Driven Accountability

How is vCenter  

Chargeback Used?

VMware vCenter Chargeback enables administrators to deliver IT 
as a service with a simple, flexible, and accurate chargeback 
model. Using vCenter Chargeback, administrators can:

• 

Create customized cost models and metrics to suit 
organizational needs

 – Flexible cost models allow IT to 

measure fixed costs, allocated costs, actual utilization or a mix 
of all three, tracking costs by business unit or group.

• 

Gain accurate visibility over virtualization costs

 – vCenter 

Chargeback captures accurate cost metrics for virtual 
environments, giving you insight in to the true costs of 
provisioned systems. vCenter Chargeback takes into account 
many different factors, ranging from hardware costs (CPU, 
memory, storage, etc.) to additional elements such as power 
and cooling. 

• 

Enable the delivery of IT as a service

 – vCenter Chargeback 

provides a charging foundation for enabling cloud computing. 
Used in conjunction with a self-service catalog, business owners 
can now have complete transparency into and accountability 
for the services they are consuming.

How Does vCenter 

Chargeback Work?

A Chargeback Hierarchy Makes it Easy to Manage 

Chargeback Models 

Administrators create a chargeback hierarchy that provides the 
basis for determining cost structures and delivery of reports.  
The hierarchy can span multiple vCenter Server instances for 
organization-wide chargeback. Cost templates simplify and 
standardize the process of adding costs for virtual machines to  
the chargeback hierarchy. Any number of cost templates can be 
created to support different cost structures across the organization.

VMware vCenter Chargeback accurately identifies costs associated with virtual resources 
and automatically ties those costs back to the business. Chargeback maintains a database 
of cost and usage metrics gathered from vCenter Server, and integrates with VMware 
vSphere™ Client to simplify cost configuration.

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