Virtualization's Chargeback Challenge By George Pradel published: Tuesday, June 12 2007
You may remember the adage, "If it's worth doing, it's worth measuring" from your early business classes in Management 101. This principle is tried and true for established business operations; but, as usual, is put to the test when a new wrinkle in business occurs, in this case, virtualized environments. As you can expect, traditional business and IT tools and tactics for tracking asset utilization have limited effectiveness when applied to virtual machines. Without the straightforward correlation of end user to application to hardware, uncertainty can arise as to what assets are being utilized by and providing value to which end users.
When properly calculated and applied for virtual environments, chargeback data can actually help lower and control expenses, rather than merely documenting and allocating them. But making the right configuration and allocation decisions requires having data on actual usage, not forecasts. The information can help enterprises bring optimization to virtualization by helping guide decisions regarding outsourcing, upgrades, new purchases, leases and service models. Chargeback and utilization data also help simplify management and reporting by enabling some consistency in how virtual and traditional assets are measured and managed.
Many organizations don’t use chargeback data to actually charge business units for the IT resources they consume. Instead, they find the data valuable for optimizing how resources are deployed and to guide forward-looking decisions about purchases, leases, licenses, warranties and other expenditures. This ability is just as valuable for virtual environments. Detailed utilization and performance data helps IT administrators decide the value of virtualizing various assets, and measure the value of virtualization efforts. The data may reveal excess capacity in some areas, or could lead to recommendations for some business units to have their own dedicated resources instead of using shared ones. Utilization data not only helps measure true IT costs, but also the relative value of different business units or initiatives relative to the IT costs they incur.
Traditional IT asset management and chargeback tools are very limited in their ability to provide this information for virtual environments. The primary limitations are their ability to capture data specific to virtual machines, and presenting it in an understandable and meaningful way.
What’s Missing
All the data needed to support IT and business decision making exists at various places within the virtual environment, but is difficult to capture and consolidate. Traditional tools are ineffective because they aren’t designed to manage the frequently changing allocations and configurations that are hallmarks of virtualization, nor do they capture important data specific to virtual machines such as CPU processing time and storage consumed by specific users.
Even when presented with the necessary data, users may have trouble making sense of it or using it to support requests for budget, support or policy changes. The traditional choices have been to develop a home-grown spreadsheet application using whatever data could be gleaned from the virtualization environment, or adapting legacy IT asset management applications, despite their rudimentary support for virtual machines.
The leading limitation and challenge to spreadsheet-based chargeback reporting is to collect the data needed to drive the application. Actual usage data can be difficult and time consuming to collect, and most virtualization software doesn’t readily provide the type of data necessary. Data availability is also a leading limitation for traditional IT asset management systems. Most were developed for mainframes and networks. At best, they are not optimized for virtualization, and at worst, they are completely incompatible. Such systems are also expensive, especially considering their limitations for virtual environments.
What’s Needed
To overcome these challenges, a virtual chargeback tool should have a convenient user interface that simplifies the tasks of collecting, reviewing, formatting and presenting data. Reporting capabilities should be flexible enough to support the enterprise’s preferred formats and metrics.
The most fundamental need is to report utilization by business group. Because virtual machine allocations change frequently and utilization is inconsistent, there are often significant variances between actual and planned usage. For the true picture of how virtual resources are utilized, actual performance data for each virtual machine should all be factored into the calculation.
What’s Coming
Chargeback reporting tools from virtualization providers solve the data issue. They can provide data and visibility that alternative methods can’t attain. Availability is the major limitation to virtualization-based chargeback tools. Chargeback features are not available for all virtualization environments, and the category is just emerging. Some currently available chargeback tools also are proprietary and may lack the flexibility to integrate with legacy IT asset management systems. Virtualization is a popular and proven strategy for optimizing IT resources and reducing costs, but costs still need to be tracked. To this point, virtualization has been much better at reducing IT costs than tracking them. Once utilization and tracking challenges are solved, users will be able to use the information to optimize their systems and get even more value from their virtual environments.
George Pradel is senior systems engineer at Vizioncore. Founded in 2002, Vizioncore Inc. is the leading provider of innovative dynamic backup, performance monitoring, migration and disaster recovery software applications that enhance VMware Infrastructure. For more information about esxCharter or any of Vizioncore's innovative products for virtualized environments, visit www.vizioncore.com or contact Pradel at
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About esxCharter
Vizoncore's esxCharter solution is designed specifically to work in virtualized environments, without the legacy issues associated with software originally created for physical environments. esxCharter provides a top-down multi-level view into the performance of virtual machines & hosts. In addition, a chargeback engine is integrated with reporting for segmenting virtual machine costs. Innovation and adoption in virtualization continues to move at breakneck pace but Vizioncore is committed to staying at the forefront of trends and needs in the space.
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