vCloud Allocation Models, vCenter Resource Pools, and Per VM Resource Settings, Say What?

Pay As You Go Model

As we see in the KB article this sounds pretty self explanatory, after all you “Pay as you Go” right?  Well this may have a few impacts on your design decisions when you think about that.  First off, it is the MOST unpredictable for billing purposes.  You’re consumers will not really be able to budget because they will be charged either higher or lower based on the usage and number of Virtual Machines they fire up.  Provided they are okay with that let’s look at the settings on an Organization vDC in my lab then look at the vCenter settings.

Here we can see the options based on Pay As You Go where we can actually set some CPU and memory.  Now what does this look like in vCenter?  As we can see below the resource pool created has essentially nothing set at the Resource Pool Level.  However take a look at the individual Virtual Machine in this vDC.

This means EVERY Virtual Machine deployed in this Model and vDC will be set individually and will not be allowed to be changed.  The only thing that will change is if the user changes the memory assigned to the VM then the limits will update accordingly.  This also means that each Virtual Machine will inherit these settings and cannot be changed by the user.