Pricing for IBM Power Virtual Server (Off-premises)

Consumer ID

Consumer ID groups the billing usages that are under a single resource such as virtual machines, shared processor pools, and storages. You can view resource usage with a broken down metrics. There is no change in billing or pricing and you continue to receive your bills as-is today.

Following are the benefits of consumer ID:

• You can see a more granular view of your bill by using the Usage page in the Billing and Usage portal.
• Charges are now broken down by resource that is identified in the Consumer ID field with the format resource-type:resource-uuid.

To view the usage details at the resource level, do the following steps:

1. Open the Billing and Usage page in the IBM Cloud console.
2. On the left navigation menu, click Usage.
3. Click View plans for the entry- Workspace for Power Virtual Server. A page listing all your workspaces is opened.
4. Click View details for a workspace. A page listing the usage details of a selected workspace is opened.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click View instance details. A page listing the usage details of the selected virtual server instance is opened.

For more information on the billing and usage page, see Billing and Usage documentation.

Monthly usage

Power Virtual Server instances are charged at a monthly rate that is prorated per hour. If you add resources to an LPAR during the middle of the month, the monthly bill for the LPAR reflects the resource change and the LPAR price that is prorated per hour.

In the following monthly usage example, the customer purchases a Power Virtual Server instance that has one core with 8 GB of memory, a 150 GB disk, and is running AIX 7200-03-02, at a base price of $250.57 per month ($0.343 per hour). As the month progresses, the customer adds more memory. The new price for the LPAR is $339.45 per month ($0.465 per hour). The monthly bill is prorated by the hour for the resources deployed.

All prices that are mentioned in the topic, Pricing for Power Virtual Server, are illustrative and do not represent the actual amounts that are used for billing. To generate an estimated price, use the Power Virtual Server Estimate pricing tool. For more information, see Generating an estimate.

In this example, the LPAR resources are increased (after reaching 300 hours in the month) from 8 GB to 16 GB of memory. The price of the LPAR is prorated by the hour for the final monthly price of $303.

Part numbers

For detailed usage and billing information, you can refer to the part number in your invoice. The part numbers in the invoice represent the charge unit. Refer to the following table to view the part number and its corresponding description.

Base instances

The base instance billing depends on your virtual instance options when you create a Power Virtual Server. The machine type, number of cores, and amount of memory all affect the base instance billing. When you create your virtual server instance, the associated monthly rate is displayed. For more information, see Creating a Power Virtual Server.

The pricing for memory is calculated based on a ratio of 64 GB per core. For example, if you use more than 16 GB for 0.25 cores, you must pay a premium high-use RAM price for the excess memory. However, if you use up to 128 GB for 2 cores, you do not have to pay any premium memory price.

Operating systems

The Power Virtual Server pricing for AIX and IBM i includes license and IBM software maintenance.

Power Virtual Server provides AIX and IBM i stock images. The operating system version levels of the stock images are subject to change.

You can also bring your own custom image to use on a Power Virtual Server instance, but you must still purchase an operating system license for virtual server resources. If you bring your own custom image, you are charged for the image size and the storage tier that you use for the image. After you deploy a stock image (and only after deployment), you are charged for the space the image is stored in. The storage unit price (per GB) for the stored boot images is the same as the selected storage tier (Tier 0 or Tier 3) where your boot disks are deployed. To identify the estimated storage rates, use the Cost Estimator tool. To reduce costs, you can capture the virtual machine and delete it when it is not needed. The pricing for AIX and IBM i operating system license is not determined by whether you use a custom image or a stock image. To learn more, go to Deploying a custom image within IBM Power Virtual Server.

The Power Virtual Server also provides Linux® stock images. You might select a Linux stock image that is provided by IBM or bring your own Red Hat Linux Enterprise (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) image OVA format. For a Linux subscription, you might opt to use a full Linux® subscription for Power Virtual Server or obtain the subscription for the Linux operating system directly from the vendor. For more information about how to create an OVA format Linux image, see deploying a Linux virtual machine.

Linux for SAP workloads

You can deploy the following types of SAP workloads as virtual machines:

• SAP NetWeaver: For SAP NetWeaver for Linux, the charges for hardware, processors, and memory are similar to other types of Linux deployments. However, the SAP NetWeaver for Linux requires a different type of operating system and license to be deployed. So, the charges for these types of deployments are not same as that of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP (non-SAP OS). SAP NetWeaver can be deployed on both S1022 and E1080 systems.

• SAP HANA: For SAP HANA, there are distinct processor and memory billing parts. The charges on these distinct parts appear on the monthly invoices. Similar to other types of deployments, the following types of systems, processors, and memory are supported for SAP HANA:

  • System types: S1022 (for workloads less than 2 TB of RAM) or E1080 (for workloads more than 2 TB of RAM)
  • Virtual processor core types: dedicated, shared capped, or shared uncapped
  • Memory types: scale-out or scale-up

For SAP HANA workloads, the charges for processor and memory parts are the same as compared to non-SAP HANA workloads. To estimate the costs for non-SAP HANA workloads, see Tables 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The pricing is subject to change depending on the SAP HANA operational costs.

Processor types

You are charged different rates depending on the processor type that you choose for your virtual machine (VM). Dedicated processors are priced the highest as they provide the best overall performance. Shared capped processors cost slightly more than shared uncapped processors because of their flexibility in addressing licensing restrictions. The processors are all charged on an hourly prorated basis according to the machine type, processor type, and the number of cores used in a month.

Each processor has a different hourly rate depending on its type (Dedicated vs Shared uncapped). Processors also have a different hourly rate depending on the system that they are on (Dedicated S922 vs Dedicated E980). For information on different processor type functions, see What's the difference between shared capped and shared uncapped processor performance? How do they compare to dedicated processor performance?.

All prices that are mentioned in the topic, Pricing for Power Virtual Server, are illustrative and do not represent the actual amounts that are used for billing. To generate an estimated price, use the Power Virtual Server cost estimator tool. For more information, see Generating an estimate.

The following tables show how different processor types affect the cost per system:

Pricing for dedicated hosts

Dedicated hosts are priced based on the host type – either an IBM Power S922 or IBM Power S1022. Each server type is metered by the hour and the price includes the entire capacity of the host.

Consider the following points for dedicated host pricing:

• You are not charged separately for shared processor pools that you deploy to the dedicated host.
• Software charges for the supported operating systems are metered and charged by the core.

To learn more about the dedicated host, see: dedicated host.

Storage types

The Power Virtual Server charges based on three different storage types:

• Data volumes: These are the simplest form of volume that you create. You are billed based on the current volume size at the metering time. The following table shows an example of how you are billed based on your volume creation:

  Calculation of data volume

  Volume size you create	You are billed
  10 GB	10 GB
  10+5 GB	15 GB

• Image backing volumes: These volumes are part of a boot image in your cloud-instance boot image catalog. You are billed based on the total volume sizes contained in the image. When the image has a single backing volume, you are billed based on the GB size of the single volume. When the image has multiple backing volumes, you are billed based on tallying up the sizes of all the image backing volumes. The following table shows an example of how you are billed based on your boot volume:

  Calculation of image backing volume

  Image volume size	Single or multiple backing	You are billed
  20 GB	Single backing volume	20 GB
  Volume 1 (20 GB), volume 2 (10 GB)	Multiple backing volumes	30 GB

• Deployed VM volumes: These volumes are created when you deploy a VM with an image. The deployed VMs get a copy of all the volumes in the image. Any additional data volumes attached to the deployed VM are already accounted for under Data Volumes. The following table shows an example of how you are billed based on the VMs that you deploy:

  Calculation of deployed VMs volume

  Image backing volume	You are billed
  20 GB	20 GB
  20 GB + 30 GB	50 GB

Pricing for VPN connection

When you use a VPN connection, you are billed monthly.

IBM charges with the base price hourly per connection. The base price varies per geography. So if you use one vpn connection that is active for a month, the monthly bill would be $base price X 24 hours X 30 days.

Pricing for Power Edge Router

There are no additional charges for PER. You are charged based on the number of Transit Gateway connections and routing options.

The following table shows the charges based on the routing option that you select:

The following table shows the charges based on the number of connections including Direct Link, VPC, Classic that you can create:

The Transit Gateway charges indicated in the preceding tables are subjected to change. See the summary of Transit Gateway charges from the provisioning page in the IBM Cloud console. See the Pricing considerations section in the Transit Gateway documentation for more information.

End of billing

The monthly billing cycle ends when you delete the LPAR. If you scale your infrastructure up and down in response to workload requirements, your billing follows the timing of the LPAR provision change. If you stop the LPAR, the billing process is not stopped. You must delete the LPAR to stop the billing cycle.

You are still charged if the VM is in a suspended state. When your VM is inactive, you can use Dynamic Logical Partitioning (DLPAR) to resize it to a minimal state. You can drastically decrease the price per hour by reducing the VM's core count and memory.