This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines for companies and organizations. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Virtual chargeback" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (February 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Virtual chargeback" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In information technology, virtual chargeback is a practice of charging back the costs of virtual IT infrastructure to departments or business units, that actually use it. This means analyzing and recording the resource utilisation on virtual machines (VMs).

The idea of chargeback in a traditional (non-virtualised) sense is not new, and references go as far back as the 1980s. 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.

Virtual chargeback can be a particularly difficult process to implement, due to the use of shared/common resources. However, the internal implementation of a chargeback process usually resides between the application and infrastructure layers, which gives the data-collection services of the application the ability to pull from virtual or actual components.

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.

Numerous attempts have been made to address this problem, some of which are available today:

• VMware vCenter Chargeback,^[1]
• PlateSpin Recon,
• vKernel,
• Nicus M-PWR,
• Exivity, Hybrid Cloud metering & billing

• Cost centre (business)
• Cost accounting
• IT chargeback and showback
• Time-sharing