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Announcing New Granular Usage and Billing View for Power Virtual Server

By SHADI Albouyeh posted Tue March 04, 2025 10:05 AM

  

Power Virtual Server provides all clients with Power Systems virtual machines in IBM Cloud to expand their hybrid cloud environment while maintaining the same level of security, performance, and reliability as on-premises systems.

What’s New?

As part of our ongoing usability improvements to IBM Power Virtual server (PowerVS) we have made a significant enhancement in terms of how resource consumption is reported in the IBM Cloud resource list, usage portal and invoices from IBM. Today, we announce a new granular billing by Cloud Resource Name (CRN) effective for all new Power Virtual Server workspaces worldwide!

With this new enhancement customers will be able to view their usage by resource type and map usage to their itemized invoice for expense tracking and management, while also having the ability to tag resources for grouping and filtering across services for improved access control. 

Previously, the IBM Cloud platform has been aware of the Power Virtual Server workspace entity and could not independently recognize usage from any of the underlying resources consumed within the workspace, such as virtual machines, storage volumes, snapshots, dedicated hosts, etc. Thus, prior to this enhancement, resource usage was only reported at the workspace level preventing users from easily determining how their individual Power Virtual Server resources were contributing to the overall cost of the environment.

 A pain point clients would often express was:

“As a user I am unable to see detailed charges at the part ID level in IBM Cloud for resources used in my PowerVS workspace thus I am unable to understand my invoice as resource charges are aggregated at the workspace level.”

Usage view by workspace

It is important to know that this enhancement does not introduce any changes in Power Virtual Server pricing. Rather, it provides complete usage and billing transparency for users to better understand how much each resource contributes to their monthly cloud spend.

The resource plans broken out as part of this enhancement include the following: 

  • Compute
    • Virtual Machine
    • Shared Processor Pool
    • Dedicated Host
  • Storage
    • Volume 
    • Snapshot

Background

The Power Virtual Server workspace entails many resources which are provisioned and metered at list price. In the past, the way usage was metered was at the workspace level, with consumption aggregated across the environment and rolled up into a lump sum. As a result, users have been unable to easily obtain an itemized view of usage, thus could not effectively determine which resources were independently contributing to the overall cost. Essentially, when you create a new resource, IBM Cloud assigns a Cloud Resource Name (CRN) to the resource which enables the identification and tracking of that resource. Now the Power Virtual Server offering meters by the compute and storage resource plans above based on CRNs, so clients can view their usage in the IBM Cloud usage dashboard by resource type with information on specific parts for each.

Usage and billing by Cloud Resource Name (CRN)

For more information on the specific plans and associated part descriptions please visit the IBM Cloud Power Virtual Server pricing docs page.

Next Steps

As of February 25, 2025, any new workspace that has been created will automatically have this new metering enhancement, thus clients will notice more usage information about the resources in those workspaces and in turn more details in their invoice. For any existing workspace, the Power Virtual Server development team will begin deploying the new metering code to each data center starting April through end of May via the following rollout plan: 

Month

Region (data centers)

April

Asia Pacific (Chennai, Sydney)

Europe (Madrid, London, Frankfurt)

South America (Sao Paolo)

Japan (Osaka, Tokyo)

May

North America (Montreal, Toronto, DC, US-East, US-South, Dallas)

 

Added Benefits

  • Itemized view of provisioned resources in the “Billing and Usage” dashboard in IBM Cloud
  • View of all provisioned Power Virtual resources in the IBM Cloud “Resource List” dashboard in a single pane of glass across all environments in IBM Cloud
  • Ability to apply user defined tags to Power Virtual Server resources for grouping and filtering across services leading to more effective access management.
  • For workspaces leveraging Power Edge Router (PER) when deploying virtual machines across different subnets, our newly announced Network Security Groups (NSG) feature allows administrators the ability to control inter-VM communication, resulting in network isolation and ensuring only necessary and authorized traffic flows between the virtual machines. For more information on Network Security Groups visit our newly published docs page.
  • Ability to use IBM Cloud global search to locate individual Power Virtual Resources provisioned with direct access to the navigate to them
  • Billing and usage plans will be listed by multi zone region (MZR) / metro as opposed to individual data centers at the top level with data center information can be found by clicking into the plan detail’s view. 
  • All individual part descriptions for resources provisioned now follow a standard and consistent naming convention for additional clarity 

In Conclusion

No additional action is required for users to take advantage of this enhancement since Power Virtual users creating new workspaces will automatically have usage sent by resource effective February 25, 2025, and all existing workspaces will automatically have this per the roll out schedule above without any disruption. For additional assistance and questions clients can engage with their Customer Support Manager (CSM) or open a support ticket. For help with identification of resources by CRN this blog has some specific examples and for additional information on Network Security Groups this please reference this blog for detailed breakdown of the setup and configuration.

Thank you for being a valuable IBM Cloud customer!

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