With the VMware Cloud Director pay-as-you-go allocation model, resources are committed only when users create vApps in the organization VDC. You can specify a percentage of resources to guarantee, which allows you to overcommit resources. You can make a pay-as-you-go organization VDC elastic by adding multiple resource pools to its provider VDC.
Resources committed to the organization are applied at the virtual machine level.
When a virtual machine is powered on, if the original resource pool cannot accommodate the virtual machine, the placement engine checks the resource pool and assigns the virtual machine to another resource pool. If a subresource pool is not available for the resource pool, VMware Cloud Director creates one with an infinite limit and zero rate. The virtual machine's rate is set to its limit times its committed resources, and the virtual machine placement engine places the virtual machine on a provider VDC resource pool.
The benefit of the pay-as-you-go model is that it can take advantage of new resources added to the provider VDC.
In rare cases, a virtual machine is switched from the resource pool it was assigned at creation to a different resource pool at power-on because of a lack of resources on the original resource pool. This change might involve a minor cost to move the virtual machine disk files to a new resource pool.
In the pay-as-you-go model, no resources are reserved ahead of time, so a virtual machine might fail to power on if there are not enough resources. Virtual machines operating under this model cannot take advantage of the resources of idle virtual machines on the same subresource pool, because resources are set at the virtual machine level.
By default, in a pay-as-you-go VDC, virtual machines obtain their reservation, limit, and shares settings from the settings of the VDC. To create or reconfigure a virtual machine with custom resource allocation settings for both CPU and memory, you can use the vCloud API. See VMware Cloud Director API Programming Guide.
