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Table 5-2. Sample Base Rates and Rate Factors (Continued)
Chargeable Resource Base Rate ($) Rate Factor Total Charge ($)
Network Received and Transmitted 0.0008 1 0.0008
Storage 0.0013 1 0.0013
Disk Read and Write 0.0008 0.75 0.0006
vCPU 0.04 1 0.04
Fixed Cost
A fixed cost is a definite cost that can be charged on an entity. Fixed costs can be recurring costs or one-time
costs.
Recurring costs that are charged periodically for specific resources or services can be defined as fixed costs in
the application. For example, the annual maintenance cost for the network or for each server. Costs that are
applicable to almost all the entities and hierarchies can be defined as fixed costs. This lets you update such
costs periodically and manage them centrally. It also ensures that all the entities and hierarchies are uniformly
charged for common services and resources.
In addition, you can also define fixed costs that are specific to an entity, a group of entities, or an entire hierarchy.
For example, the real estate cost for physical storage of the servers. This cost differs based on the actual
geographic location.
A one-time fixed cost is a charge that you want to levy once on an entity for a service provided. For example,
virtual machine provisioning fees. This is a one-time cost that you want to charge for every virtual machine
provisioned. If the time when the fixed cost is applied on an entity falls within the reporting duration, then
the report generated on the entity or its parent includes this cost.
Billing Policy
A billing policy determines the amount of chargeable computing resources units to be considered, the
corresponding base rates, and fixed costs for calculating the chargeback cost.
vCenter Chargeback Manager provides the various billing policies. Each billing policy only accounts for the
amount of resource consumed, reserved, or allocated during the reporting duration.
Fixed Cost
Only the fixed costs associated with each entity in the chargeback hierarchy is
considered for billing. The fixed costs include the vServices and guest operating
system costs defined in the pricing model, any attribute name-value pair rule-
based fixed costs defined in the pricing model that are applicable on the
hierarchical entities, fixed costs explicitly set on the hierarchical entities for the
Chapter 5 Managing and Configuring vCenter Chargeback Manager Cost Elements
VMware, Inc. 73