Virtualization and Chargeback

The concept of chargeback in the computer industry has been around for years. The mainframe provided the worklevel smf records, which allowed reporting tools like CA's Job Accounting and Reporting (JARS) to divide up the records of which services were being used by which customers. The reporting allowed for summarization by resources used.

Fast forward to the current world where virtualization has become a commodity and everyone from managed services organizations to the "Cloud" are running some type of hypervisor. So I pose the question to the industry, what is the costing model for sharing a resource and how much is a customer expected to pay?

Also keep in mind that the number one rule for a charge back program is that the processs must be repeatable, meaning if I run the same data base query every night, the cost should be the same.

So with these initial concepts in place, it will be interesting to see the various chargeback models as they come to market and even more interesting will be the hypervisor vendors and what performance and usage records they will produce that will allow chargeback systems to be created and brought to market.

Next posting will be a list of charge back vendors and how they are getting the data.