When a quota is assigned to a consumer or a resource, each action by that consumer or on the resource involving storage, vCPU, or memory results in quota consumption or quota release.

Since the quota acts as an upper bound that limits the user's access to resources, the quota calculations may differ from the actual current use of the user. The quota is calculated for the max growth potential and not the current usage.

Example 17.1. Accounting example

A user runs a virtual machine with 1 vCPU and 1024 MB memory. The action consumes 1 vCPU and 1024 MB of the quota assigned to that user. When the virtual machine is stopped 1 vCPU and 1024 MB of RAM are released back to the quota assigned to that user. Run-time quota consumption is accounted for only during the actual run-time of the consumer.

A user creates a virtual thin provision disk of 10 GB. The actual disk usage may indicate only 3 GB of that disk are actually in use. The quota consumption, however, would be 10 GB, the max growth potential of that disk.