Cost drivers are the expense types used by vRealize Operations to calculate the cost of your private cloud. The total private cloud cost is the sum of cost drivers. Changes that are made to cost drivers are reflected only after the next run of the cost engine1. Cost drivers cover server hardware, storage, licenses, application, maintenance, labor, network, facilities, and additional costs configured within vRealize Operations2. When calculating the monthly cluster costs, vRealize Operations considers the following two types of cost drivers:

VMware software per socket: This is the cost of VMware licenses based on the number of sockets in the cluster. You can assign different license costs to different clusters depending on the edition and features you use3.

Storage maintenance as a percentage of hardware costs: This is the cost of maintaining the storage hardware used by the cluster. You can specify the percentage of the storage hardware cost that goes into maintenance. For example, if the storage hardware cost is $10,000 and the maintenance percentage is 10%, the storage maintenance cost is $1,0004. References: 1: Overview of Cost Drivers 2: VM Pricing with vRealize Automation 8.1 and vRealize Operations 8.1 3: License Cost Driver 4: Storage Cost Driver