You can create pricing cards in VMware Aria Operations to calculate the price associated with your virtual infrastructure. You can assign pricing cards to vCenters or Clusters, depending on the pricing strategy determined by VMware Aria Operations administrator. The pricing cards help you to set the price for each resource present in your virtual environment.

You can customize the pricing card as per your requirement. VMware Aria Operations has two types of pricing cards, rate-based pricing card and cost-based pricing card. After configuring a pricing card, you can assign it to one or more vCenters or Clusters as determined by the pricing strategy.

Note: From this release, you can continue to create pricing cards or you can migrate vCenter pricing cards to vCenter pricing policies. For details about creating a new pricing card, see Add New Pricing Card. For details about migrating vCenter Pricing cards to vCenter pricing policies, see Migration of vCenter Pricing Cards to vCenter Pricing Policies.

How Is Price Calculated

In rate-based pricing policy VMware Aria Operations calculates the virtual infrastructure price based on the rate card defined by you. For rate-based pricing policy VMware Aria Operationslets you define cost elements as per your requirements.

The server recalculates the price every 24-hours, the price calculation for the new pricing cards is done in the next VMware Aria Operations price calculation cycle.

Hierarchy of Pricing Policy

The assignment of policy in VMware Aria Operationswill be for Clusters and vCenters. The price is calculated for virtual machines, then it is aggregated and rolled up to vCenter. If there are two policies, a default policy for vCenter and another policy for Cluster, then the price calculation is based on the cluster policy for all the resources under the cluster. After that the cluster cost is rolled up to vCenter.

When a virtual machine is under VMware Aria Automation hierarchy and vCenter hierarchy, then the pricing is calculated based on the VMware Aria Automation hierarchy and the virtual machine is removed from the vCenter resources and included under VMware Aria Automation resources.

Pricing Support for VMware Cloud on AWS Resources

You can create a pricing policy in VMware Aria Operationsand assign it to VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) resources, however you can only use the rate-based pricing policy for VMC-related objects.
Note: When you assign Cost-Based Policy for VMC resources, the policy is not applied, and price calculated for the policy is reported as zero.