Cost models control projected costs displayed throughout Commander, such as service catalog costs and deployed VM costs. Cost models are also used to help generate historical information in reports that can assist you in managing your virtual infrastructure resources.
A cost model contains distinct CPU, memory, storage, operating system, support, and optional custom costs. For private clouds, cost models enable you to assign different costs to high-end versus low-end compute resources, to different cloud platforms, or to different groups of consumers. For public clouds, cost models enable you to overlay instance costs with additional IT support costs, backup costs, and software application licensing costs.
The currency for cloud costs used in Commander version 8.7 or later can be configured to any currency supported by the European Central Bank.
To set up cost models, see Configure Cost Models.
On-premise and off-premise cost models
Cost models for on-premise and off-premise services work differently.
On-premise cost models
Cost models for on-premise services allow you to set values for memory, CPU, storage, OS, and support costs.
Commander includes a Default Private Cloud cost model for on-premise services. The Default Private Cloud cost model applies to all parts of your infrastructure not covered by another cost model.
Off-premise cost models
Cost models for off-premise services have most values set to zero and don't include explicit settings for memory and CPU costs. Because public cloud vendors don't provide a breakdown of CPU and memory costs, Commander determines CPU and memory costs using instance types from the public cloud provider. For more information, see Calculate Projected Public Cloud Costs.
The default public cloud cost models are automatically applied when a public cloud account is added as a cloud account to Commander.
For more specific information on costing for supported public clouds, see:
Infrastructure and comparison cost models
Under Configuration > Costs, on the Cost Models tab, cost models are divided into two categories:
- Supported Clouds: Cost models for supported clouds are assigned to infrastructure managed by Commander. Commander currently supports VMware vCenter, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Hyper-V SCVMM.
- Other Public Clouds: Cost models for other public clouds are used only by the Cloud Migration Planner report to project costs for the following public clouds:
- IBM Cloud
- Rackspace
These cost models can't be assigned to parts of your virtual infrastructure. While it's possible to edit values in these cost models, you will likely not need to do so.