by Craig

Installing vCenter chargeback (Part 2)

I know that last time i was all excited about installing vCenter chargeback, and indeed i was, but now i feel a little deflated. Mostly this is because i really didnt enjoy using the software once i had it up and running.

Now before you think i might launch into a huge review of the good and bad about this well then i am going to disappoint. Really the product is too large and too complicated to get into here so i will summarise my experience in a few points:

  • It really isn’t very user friendly - i did read the (large) manual and still struggled to get the data from vCenter into chargeback. Even then it was still full of someone else’s ideas of how a chargeback model should work rather than yours
  • It’s slightly buggy - when i “slightly” i should really say “a lot”. For a product that that is as rock solid as ESX the chargeback functionality was all over the place throwing errors at odd times with the old login/logout option being the best way to fix them.
  • It’s complicated - i mean REALLY complicated to set-up. Lots of filling in various fields and working out very fine details to create the exact picture of the landscape you want. This might be a good thing for large enterprises who know exactly what they want to do but for me it’s just too much

The nail in the coffin?

  • It’s expensive, very expensive. I’ve looked at other products now and they offer chargeback and more, much more. With everything in VMware now being priced on the Virtual Machines it was getting very expensive very quickly. 

This is what i don’t understand about the entire VMware approach currently, every VM will cost you money on hardware but will cost you on Virtual Software. Meaning that the gap (TCO) between hardware and virtualisation is getting ever narrower and less attractive. Why VMware why?

The chargeback product, although very clever, is a great example of where VMware is going wrong with its pricing. For an environment of 300 Virtual Machines (hardly monsterous) we are looking at between £8,000 - £10,000 to deploy chargeback. That means we need to charge £25-£35 to each virtual machine for the privilege of being charged in the first place!

For that price it just isn’t worth it and hence i stopped working on it. Maybe in the future, maybe.