Pricing per datacenter and reseller support

Introduction to pricing improvements

Abiquo 3.10 introduces new and improved functionality in the pricing feature:

• Differentiate your cloud offer by location with different resource prices per private cloud datacenter and public cloud region
  
  • Public cloud pricing by hardware profile will be introduced in future versions
• Separate pricing for CPUs and RAM when virtual machines are ON or OFF
• Added pricing for local datastore tiered storage
• Display the current virtual appliance price at any time, simply by clicking the virtual appliance estimate button
  
  • Add a list of prices per virtual machine to the estimate message with the new VM_PRICES variable
• Reseller pricing
  
  • A pricing model now has an automatic scope (the same as the creating user's), so pricing users can manage only their own models for their own tenants
    
    • Users with pricing privileges can always view the pricing model assigned to their own enterprise
  • The reseller's resource prices are the base prices and the reseller can mark them up (or down) in each new pricing model for their customers

Pricing upgrade

When you upgrade from 3.8.x to 3.10, Abiquo will assign the prices of an existing pricing model to each individual datacenters now in the pricing model

Pricing estimate message

At any time, users of enterprises with a pricing model can obtain a pricing estimate for deploying the whole virtual appliance by clicking the Estimate button. The button label has the currency code of the pricing model if the user can retrieve their tenant's pricing model. Otherwise the platform will display the default '$' dollar symbol.

The functionality to display a pricing message on deploy is the same as in previous versions. And API users can obtain a pricing message through the API as in previous versions.

Pricing estimate message content

To display a breakdown of prices per virtual machine, add the new "%VM_PRICES%" variable to the pricing message.

The variable will create a list of prices for all VMs in the virtual appliance. For example, the VMs here are called yVM and yVM (1).

Create a pricing model

Abiquo 3.10 supports reseller pricing with pricing scope and default base prices per datacenter.

Scope for pricing models

Abiquo controls access to pricing models with scope, according to these rules

• When a user creates a pricing model, Abiquo automatically assigns the user's tenant scope. This scope cannot be changed
• Abiquo only allows users with the same tenant scope (who can administer exactly the same customers) to manage the user's pricing models
• All users with pricing privileges can view the pricing model assigned to their own tenant

Pricing per datacenter

When you create a pricing model, first enter the general information.

Then select a private cloud datacenter or a public cloud region and enter the base prices for that datacenter. 

Note that you now set a separate price for CPU and RAM when the virtual machine is powered ON or OFF.

You can set a separate price for each datastore tier and external storage tier.

And you can set prices for cost codes for virtual machine templates as before. 

Assign pricing models to resellers

After you create an initial pricing model, you can assign it to your resellers. They can view this pricing model with base prices, which are the prices they will pay for datacenter resources. They can then create pricing models for their customers using this pricing model. For full details see the guide to Pricing for Resellers.

Creating customer pricing models

If your enterprise has a pricing model assigned, when you create another pricing model, you can increase or decrease existing prices. 

When you select the datacenter, Abiquo loads the existing prices and then applies your percentage change. You can accept the new prices or manually enter a price. If you enter a price that is lower than the base price, Abiquo will highlight the price with red text.

See Pricing View.