Virtual Machine Manager 2008: Cost Center
Hey All,
One of the nice things in Virtual Machine Manager is the Cost Center feature. Although this seems like “just another field in the database”, it can come in handy when you need to prove to your management which business unit is using what resources. Or, if the servers are used for certain projects, you can prove which project is using what. This can be handy when you need more hardware and the management asks a prove if you are using everything you’ve got ;-)
In my example, I’ve added some cost centers to some servers. You do this by double-clicking on the virtual server or by opening the properties of it.
As you can see, I’ve added the Cost Center MSS to this server (which is actually the business unit I’m working for ;-))
Now the fun starts when you have Operations Manager in place and you have imported the Virtual Machine Manager Management Pack into OpsMgr. Now you get cool reporting.
In Virtual Machine Manager, I go to reporting and I have one interesting report called Virtual Machine Allocation
Ok, I hid the names of the cost centers but the important thing is that you can see that for each cost center I can see the # of VM’s, # of VM’s deployed, # in the library, # of processors, total allocated memory, number of disks, max disk space allocated and the number of nics.
Now the management has a great overview of who’s using all the hardware resources within the company.
Cheers,
Mike