This means analyzing and recording the resource utilisation on virtual machines (VMs).
Publications available on the Internet generally support the notion that chargeback involved charging departments based on actual resource consumption rather than forecast usage.
Chargeback is most relevant to IT departments, simply because almost all areas of an organisation use computing resources.
Rather than IT having to justify expenditures for another area of the organisation, the burden is on those departments who are actually planning on using the resource provided by IT.
Reasons for using a chargeback model include: • More effective use of IT services due to customers becoming more conscious of the cost associated with new hardware and software • A better understanding of the TCO (total cost of ownership) for performing a business function • Prevention of business groups being charged for applications and services they rarely use • The entire IT infrastructure is taken into account (i.e. from network I/O through to storage) While numerous tools exist for tracking asset utilisation in a traditional sense (such as Microsoft's Operations Manager), they are considered by some to be of limited use when it comes to virtual machines.