Microsoft during the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) announced the release candidate of a new add-on for System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2, introducing the Self-Service Portal 2.0 (VMMSSP).
VMMSSP is a stand-alone product and not an upgrade for the current version of the SCVMM self-service portal. You can choose to deploy and use one or both self-service portals depending on your requirements.
VMMSSP has the following features:
- Configuration and allocation of datacenter resources: Store management and configuration information related to compute, network and storage resources as assets in the VMMSSP database.
- Customisation of virtual machine actions: Provide a simple web-based interface to extend the default virtual machine actions; for example, you can add scripts that interact with Storage Area Networks for rapid deployment of virtual machines.
- Business unit on-boarding: Standardised forms and a simple workflow for registering and approving or rejecting business units to enroll in the portal.
- Infrastructure request and change management: Standardised forms and human-driven workflow that results in reducing the time needed to provision infrastructures in your environment.
- Self-Service provisioning: Supports bulk creation of virtual machines on provisioned infrastructure through the web-based interface.Helps business units to manage their virtual machines based on delegated roles.
The portal, built on Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter or Enterprise editions and Hyper-V, is a Web-based user interface that includes separate areas for datacenter managers and business users. It gives both types of users a way to customise VM actions depending on role-based access controls. For example, IT pros can add scripts that interact with SANs to deploy VMs quickly while business users can manage their own resources using a chargeback feature.
Using VMMSSP, administrators can register business unit requirements in one central location and business unit admins can request resources available in the resource pool to host their IT services.
All in all, the tool makes the most sense for hosting providers and for private clouds for resources on demand within an organisation.