With EVM, enterprises can create cost transparency and accountability so business owners and IT administrators can understand the actual cost of the virtual infrastructure required to support business services. In physical datacenters, chargeback was relatively straight forward to implement by associating the cost of the physical hardware with an application or business unit. In the virtual datacenter, chargeback is more complex since it requires detailed information on the utilization of resources in a shared infrastructure. EVM was designed specifically for the virtual data center. It constantly monitors the actual consumption of server, storage, and network resources and organizes the data by enterprise specific classifications.

Outside of formal chargeback programs, organizations implementing virtualization often find themselves fighting the perception by application owners or line of business users that “VMs are Free”. Management has no way of tracking the costs of specific applications. As the virtual infrastructure grows, it is difficult to assess the reasons for growth. Even organizations that don’t want to implement a formal chargeback program are challenged to understand who is using what part of the virtual infrastructure and which users are driving the growth of the infrastructure.

To demonstrate the value of the resources being provided to users, fine-grained resource utilization and tracking is important in a virtualized infrastructure. Whether formal chargeback or just showback is being leveraged, it is beneficial to understand who is using the shared resources and the associated costs. EVM provides the following capabilities:

• Support for any combination of fixed cost, allocation-based and usage-based chargeback allows flexible chargeback models to be implemented.
• Support for multiple rate tables based on enterprise-defined Business, IT, and Workload categories as well as location and lifecycle stage.
• Support for configurable time periods such as “business hours” or “trading days”.
• Extensive reporting capabilities allow usage data to be presented in a variety of formats appropriate to the recipient.