What is VMware Chargeback & Configure with Cloud Director

What is VMware Chargeback & Configure with Cloud Director

VMware Chargeback is a comprehensive metering, costing, and billing solution specifically designed to integrate with VMware environments, most notably VMware Cloud Director (VCD). It enables service providers and enterprise IT teams to accurately track and allocate the costs of virtualized infrastructure usage across multiple tenants, business units, or departments.

🚀 Purpose and Benefits

  • VMware Chargeback transforms raw resource consumption into meaningful financial insights. This enables:
  • Chargeback: Billing customers or departments based on their actual consumption of IT resources.
  • Showback: Informing departments of their resource usage and the associated costs, without actual billing.
  • Budgeting & Forecasting: Helping plan IT costs based on historical and predictive usage trends.
  • Cost Transparency: Breaking down usage by vApps, VMs, virtual data centers (vDCs), and even custom groups.

🛠️ Key Features

🔗 Integration with Cloud Director

  • Native support for VMware Cloud Director (VCD).
  • Maps vDCs, organizations, vApps, and VMs to billing units.

📊 Flexible Pricing Models

  • Define pricing policies for compute (CPU/RAM), storage, networking, and more.
  • Support for tiered pricing, flat rates, or usage-based rates.
  • Different pricing models can be assigned to different tenants or vDCs.

📈 Detailed Usage and Billing Reports

  • Real-time and historical reporting.
  • Export reports in various formats (PDF, Excel, CSV).
  • Per-tenant dashboards showing cost breakdowns.

🔄 Automated Invoicing

  • Schedule invoice generation.
  • Include branding and tenant-specific details.
  • Supports currency and tax configurations.

⚙️ Multi-tenancy Support

  • Isolates data per tenant.
  • Each tenant sees only their usage and billing

VMware Chargeback Deployment

Download the VMware Chargeback from VMware Download and Deploy the OVF using the vCenter interface

Select the Virtual Machine name and folder

Select the Management cluster where you want to deploy this appliance

Review the configuration and agree with licensing agreements

Select the Storage and Network

Provide below configuration details

  • vRealize Operations Manager Address
  • Default Gateway
  • Domain Name
  • Domain Search Path
  • Domain Name Servers
  • Network IP Address
  • Network Mask

Review the configuration and Click Finish to proceed with deployment

Once the deployment is complete access the Chargeback appliance URL https://IP-Address-or-FQDN/ and select Cloud Director to configure with Cloud Director.

Select Local Users and use the same vRealize Operations admin credentials to login

Click on Admin Settings - Integrations - vRealize Operations to Complete the vRealize Operation Integration

Click on Admin Settings - Integrations - vCloud Director to integrate with Cloud Director

Click on Admin Settings - Support - SSL Certificate to replace the appliance certificate

Click on Admin Settings - Integrations - NSX-T to see the NSX-T inventory is updated which will automatically populate after Cloud Director integration.

Click on Admin Settings - Support - Self Health to Configure the Cloud Director Plugin and the Tenant UI

Provide the Cloud Director Public Address and credentials, and the Chargeback Address as Tenant App Proxy

This will install and trust the Change back SSL certificate with Cloud Director appliance.

Thanks, 😊

If you have any comments, please drop me a line