Setup vRealize Automation Cost profiles & currency

When setting up costing in vRealize Automation you can use cost profiles and storage cost profiles to provide cost information in the Catalog. First, you have to associate cost with compute resources which essentially is a pool of clusters available as an endpoint in your vRealize Automation environment. In vRealize Automation this is called a ‘Cost profile‘, which are defined at a fabric level by the Fabric administrator.

Because compute resources are grouped in fabric groups, in turn fabric groups are divided up into reservations to carves out a part of the fabric. These reservations are then associated with business group within tenants. The cost profiles associated with the computed resources 4 levels below, propagate through the vRealize Automation hierarchy. So the Cost profile applies to all the virtual machines created out of the fabric.

Cost profiles

vRealize Automation uses two different cost profiles:

1. Cost profiles – includes compute and storage cost;
2. Storage cost profiles – includes storage cost only (overrides storage cost used in cost profiles).

NOTE: The cost provided in Cost profiles and Storage cost profiles are based on daily cost.

Storage cost can be included in the Cost profiles when only one storage tier is used with the same costing model on all datastores. Storage cost profiles are used when you have datastores of different characteristic which are presented to same cluster.

Blueprint cost

Besides the cost provided in the Cost profile and the Storage Cost profile you can also include cost in the Blueprints.

These cost definitions are primarily used for software licensing cost.

Total cost calculation

The total cost of a virtual machine includes the cost in the Cost profile + the cost in the Storage cost profile + the cost defined in the blueprint (see below).

How to setup

To setup Cost profiles, login to your vRealize Automation portal with Fabric Administrator credentials and go to [Infrastructure -> Compute Resources -> Cost profiles]

You can create different cost profiles for test, production, development environments.

Next up, we need to apply the cost profiles

In the compute resource section, select [Compute resource] and select the cluster name and edit the resource cluster you want to assign the cost profile(s) to. Go to Configuration tab and select the appropriate Compute Cost profile. To apply Storage cost profiles, select a datastore and apply the appropriate Storage cost profile to it.

Now when you provision a virtual machine, you will see daily cost which will vary as you increase CPU, memory and/or storage.

Change currency

When you install vRealize Automation the default currency format in cost profiles, blueprint cost and as a result all items in the Catalog is US dollars ($).

To change this simply go to [Infrastructure -> Administration -> Global Properties] and look for the ‘Core‘ subgroup under ‘Group: Installation’. Click the pencil to edit the currency format as shown below.

In my case it should be Dutch, so I changed it to ‘nl-NL‘.

Below a list of frequently used currency formats.