Overview
The UT-VMG team sends monthly reports to VM contacts for UT-VMG and "UT-V classic". The reports sent to customers contain more detail about the VMs than the reports sent to accounting and go out to both technical and billing contacts for the VMs. See Article KB0012527 - UT-VMG - Billing for additional information.
The billing period for the report is always the preceding full month. For instance, the billing report received in July will include the billing charges for the month of June. If changes are needed to a VM's contact information, contact the UT Service Desk and provide the VM name and changes you would like made; for VMs in the self-service environment see Article KB0015646 - Updating VM Attributes.
Spreadsheet Columns
|
Column Name
|
Explanation
|
|---|---|
| Name |
The name of the VM as it exists in vCenter (system of record).
|
| [Month Year] Charges |
The amount that will be billed for the the billing period for the VM. The daily cost of the VM is recorded each night based on the quantity and daily price (yearly price / days in fiscal year) of each specification (memory, tier 1 disk, tier 2 disk, backups). The daily costs and once-per-year costs are then summed to arrive at the billing period's charges. |
| AccountNumber | The account number on record that will be charged. |
| DaysInMonthCharged | Number of days the VM existed in the previous month with the corresponding name and internal ID. |
| IncludedOncePerYearCharges | The number of once-per-year charges applied to the VM for the billing period. Currently, the only once-per-year charge we have is for the backup license. So, this will be 1 or 0. Starting with September 2017's billing period (which will come out in October 2017), the backup license will be discontinued and rolled into the other charges to more accurately reflect the drivers of backup license costs. After that, this will be zero and eventually likely removed from the report. |
| BackupOptOutStatus |
Whether the VM has been opted out of backups as of the last day of the month (or the last day the VM existed in the month, if it was deleted, renamed, restored from backup, etc.). The possible values are:
|
| vCenter | The VMware vCenter server that manages the VM. |
| vCenterFolder | The folder in vCenter in which the VM resides. |
| Cluster | The VMware host cluster in which the the VM resides. |
| ProvisioningGroup | The provisioning group in which the VM resides. This will be blank if the VM is in “UT-V classic”. |
| DepartmentCode | Four-character department code we have on record for the VM. |
| BillingContactEmails | Billing contact email addresses we have on file for the VM. |
| TechnicalContactEmails | Technical contacts email addresses we have on file for the VM. |
| UT-V vRAM | This is the sum of the billing period's charges resulting from the amount of memory allocated to the VM. |
| VMSU T1 | This is the sum of the billng period's charges resulting from the tier 1 storage allocated to the VM. The name "VMSU T1" has been chosen to align with the label in the rate sheet distributed as part of the FY17-18 rate changes. VMSU stood for "Virtual Machine Storage Unit" and was created when storage was allocated in blocks of certain numbers of gigabytes (GB). That no longer applies and customers are free to request an arbitrary number of GB. We hope to update this label with the next rate review. The label does not impact the way rates are calculated. |
| VMSU T2 | This is the sum of the billing period's charges resulting from the tier 2 storage allocated to the VM. See above regarding the "VMSU" term. |
| VM Backup Storage | This is the sum of the billing period's charges resulting from the VM-level backups provided by the service. |
Receiving Multiple Copies of the Email or Missing VMs
A spreadsheet and email is generated for each email address we have listed as a contact and the report includes all the VMs with that contact. If the email address we have for a particular groups' VMs is not consistent, customers may receive multiple instances of the report or find that some VMs they expect to be included are not. For instance, one VM may have a customer's @austin.utexas.edu address and another may have the customer's @utexas.edu address. Or an individual's address may be included along with a mailing list the individual belongs to. We recommend customers use mailing lists or distribution groups that they manage and monitor as the email contacts for VMs wherever possible.