Use the simple calculator for discovering and pricing machines in your VMware Cloud account

Products

• CloudHealth

Issue/Introduction

The Simple Pricing Calculator is a legacy feature available only to legacy customers who have chosen not to enable Benchmark Pricing. If you are a new customer who wants to use the Simple Pricing Calculator instead of Benchmark Pricing, contact support. 

Resolution

Table of Contents

• Step 1: Select Account and Pricing Interval
• Step 2: Select Pricing Mechanism
• Step 3: Analyze Machine Costs

Step 1: Select Account and Pricing Interval

1. In the platform, from the left menu, select Setup > Admin > Pricing. 

2. Select one or more VMware accounts whose machines you want to price. 

3. Select the intervals at which you want a cost applied to each machine: Day, Week, or Month. 

4. For example, if you select the Month interval and then specify an OS maintenance cost of $8.00, each machine in the selected account is allocated $8.00/month in OS maintenance. 

Step 2: Select Pricing Mechanism

You can allocate costs to a machine in one of two ways. 

 

Approach	When to Use
By Configuration	To itemize fixed and recurring costs that make up the total cost for each unique machine configuration.
By Tags	To apply a flat cost for each tag key value.

 

Option 1: Price by Configuration

With this option, the platform identifies unique machine configurations in your data center environment. You can then itemize the fixed and recurring costs that make up the total cost for each unique machine configuration. 

1. In the Price assets by field, select Configuration. Unique hardware and software configurations in your environment appear below the form. 

2. All pricing configurations appear in the Assets menu in the platform. 

3. Default recurring costs include Per Core, Per GB of Memory, Per GB of Storage, Windows License, and Linux License. You can also add or remove fixed costs with custom names. 

4. Click Calculate Pricing.

5. The platform applies your pricing mechanism to all unique machine configurations.

6. By default, the platform applies the new pricing from this point on. To attach the new price from the time the asset was first discovered by the CloudHealth Aggregator:

   1. Select Price Historically.

   2. Then click Save Prices. 

Option 2: Price by Tag

Use this option to associate a cost with a specific tag key value for machines in your environment. 

1. In the Price assets by field, select Tag. 

2. From the Select a tag dropdown, choose a tag key whose values you want to price. 

3. The platform searches your environment for all machines that are tagged with the selected key. Unique values of the key appear along with the option to price each value. 

4. In this example, each machine under the CloudHealth account that is tagged as Environment:Development is assigned the tag CloudHealth_vm_cost:$4.00/day. Similarly, each VM under the example account that is tagged as Environment:Production is assigned, a CloudHealth_vm_cost:$5.00/day. 

5. By default, CloudHealth applies the new pricing from this point on. To attach the new price from the time the asset was first discovered by the CloudHealth Aggregator:

   1. Select Price Historically.

   2. Then click Save Prices.  

Step 3: Analyze Machine Costs

1. The machine costs you specify appear immediately in the Asset report. From the left menu, select Assets > Machine.
2. The platform also reflects the new pricing in the Cost History report within 24 hours from when you apply save the new pricing.
3. If you did not select the Price Historically option when specifying the machine costs, the new prices appear in the Cost History report from this point on.
4. From the left menu, select Reports > Cost > History.
5. You can dive deeper into this report for further analysis. For example, you can modify the report Category to display costs by Datacenter.
6. You can then analyze how instance type costs have changed historically by analyzing the table below the chart.