Self-Service Portals Let Your Users Manage Virtual Machines

December 2nd, 2009 by Patrick M.

SCVMM 2008 (or “System Center Virtual Machine Manager”) is Microsoft’s answer to a “unified, multi-vendor management solution for the virtual datacenter.” SCVMM R2 was released recently, and along with it came the ability to set up a Self-Service Portal. Using a Self-Service Portal, IT professionals can easily allow others to create, manage, and maintain virtual machines through a web-based interface.

Before setting up the Self-Service Portal, you’ll need a fully-configured SCVMM infrastructure. Luckily, that can be done with a single server or a whole server farm.

The primary constituents to setting up the Self Service Portal are:

Hosts and/or Host Groups

Hosts or Host Groups are servers that support running virtual machines within your infrastructure. Its primary requirement is that Hyper-V must be installed, and Self-Service Portals will need Hyper-V R2 installed.

Library Servers

The library servers are servers or file share locations that hold the required pieces for creating and managing virtual machines. Those bits and pieces consist of installation media (such as CD/DVD Images of operating systems), virtual hard drives, or VHDs, and potentially templates.

Templates

Templates are generic, off-line virtual machines that you can configure and redeploy as fully functional virtual machines. One could have a series of templates residing on the Library servers with a different specialization for each (web server, database, etc.).

Self Service Users

Self Service Users are users who are allowed to log into and use the Self-Service Portal. The administrator can define tasks users are allowed to perform, and can range anywhere from simply starting or stopping virtual machines to full control of creating and deleting them.

While there are many steps required steps to configure all that, they aren’t difficult to perform. One could go from a bare Windows Server 2008 R2 installation to a fully functional Self-Service Portal setup in an afternoon.

As the administrator of a virtual environment, you can also assign “quota points” to authorized Self-Service users. Quota points dictate how many virtual machines a user can install and run at any given time. I could see this being a very useful tool in any type of development environment where the developers may need to set up and take down virtual machines on the fly without having a single person or team be responsible for all virtual machine actions. The quota points also ensure that no one user uses more resources than the environment is able to handle.

SCVMM 2008’s Self-Service Portal really is a great step toward seamlessly integrating and organizing multiple users on one device. If you’re already using it, make sure to let us know how you make it work for your business!