New software produced by VMware Inc will let IT shops build into their chargeback schemes the cost of the virtualised resources that are consumed in delivering a specific application or business service.

The vCenter Chargeback toolset will provide business units with a clear view into virtualised resources consumed and their associated costs, the company said today of one of two new products that address different aspects of application performance management in virtualised environments.

Along with vCenter AppSpeed, which provides service-level reports on multi-tier applications running in virtual machines, the products will be delivered as plug-in options to VMware’s core systems management vCenter suite. 

Martin Niemer, EMEA Product Marketing, VMware told us, “vCenter Chargeback can be used to monitor the costs associated with running virtual machines in one of several ways. It can be used to account for the costs of resources that are assigned to VMs, or used to monitor how those assigned resources are actually consumed to account for actual resource usage. Those resources could be CPU, I/O, memory, disk, power and cooling, or however else you want to cut and cost the resources that are assigned or used by VMs.”

VMWare said its system would automatically create detailed billing reports that can be submitted to business units within an organisation to map IT costs to business units, cost centres, or external customers.

By enabling a better understanding of how much VM resources cost and what can be done to optimise utilisation it should be possible to reduce overall spend on the IT infrastructure. 

The idea is that being able to cost and/or charge for a VM resource, is the best way of determining what business value it is delivering.

The new chargeback software comes in at $750 per processor and is available now.

The other VCenter plug-in announced today, AppSpeed, is designed to inspect traffic, discover and map the VM environment, so that performance can be monitored against SLAs.

The system discovers the relationships between VMs and applications, groups VMs into logical units and then maps their dependencies so that administrators can see how application performance is impacted by performance of different elements at different tiers of the of application infrastructure.

VMware has also announced an upgraded Lab Manager test and development suite.