A wonderful thing has come to light. Microsoft has taken a burden away from the lowly IT Admin running the Virtual hosting environment for his company. How would you like the ability to, on a per user or per group basis, with a reasonable level of granularity, let users power on, power off, do minor configuration, even create their own guest Virtual machines. This is now a reality, and can be done through System Center Virtual Machine Manager and the Self Service web portal.
On the face of it, you get a web site with ActiveX controls for remote control and the ability to assign ownership of existing machines to users or groups in your domain. When you dig down deep you also can setup templates for use in machine creation, you can assign specific VM hosts as the place users can create their own machines. You can prevent any new guest from hogging too much CPU or memory or disk, you can assign thresholds to the hosts to prevent the guests from taking the host down with them.
It all begins with VMM itself. You setup and install SCVMM on a host, then you need to install the SCVMM web portal on a server with IIS.
The end user web interface is nice, clean and simple.
You see the list of VMs you are “owner” of, you can see the resources assigned to them, their status of on or off and the ability to control them.
Within the Virtual Machine Manager Administrator Console you control the user roles defined on the system. This is where you get to define what can be done by which group of users. The default user group for the “Self-Service Portal” is Self Service Admins. Assign membership of this to your group of users, then you grant the ability to “globally” (depending on which machines they are end result “owners” of, they can perform the granted actions.
On existing machines you control the actions that are able to be performed.
For the creation of new machines you specify the templates available
And you specify which VM hosts are available to store the resulting VM guests and the ISOs available to mount.
I hope this has given you enough info to want to dig in and investigate more yourself.
