SCVMM Self-Service Portal

Recently I got a chance to play with SCVMM Self-Service Portal and deployed in a test environment. I found it is quite an useful tools to provision virtual machines in term of time saving and consumes lesser human resource, especially in large environment, where as the member of departments able to deploy own VM self-service.

Introduction of SCVMM Self-Service Portal (SSP)

SSP is a component of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, where SCVMM is required in order to run SSP. SSP is cloud based application, it requires a web server to host, and this web server will communicate with SCVMM server. The SSP is like a middleman, to allow user to communicate with SCVMM via a web interface. In order to use SSP, the user must have Internet Explorer installed on the computer, as ActiveX is required for SSP.

The main purpose of using SSP is to allow the user to self-provision their own VMs on Hyper-V host.

SCVMM server is used to communicate and administrate Hyper-V host group which already consolidated. By using the web interface to logon to SSP, user will be able to provision and manage own VMs.

This product is specially made for the environment which lack of human resource to provision and manage virtual machines to end user, due to excessive demand.

Differences of VMM SSP and SCVMM Console

SCVMM Console is actually a console solely build for administrative purposes, such as like managing host group, VM provisioning and managing, create and modify VM templates, resource management and optimization of virtual environment. VMM SSP is actually a console solely built for end user, with a limited features and functions compared to SCVMM Console. The purposed of VMM SSP is mainly allow end users to provision and manage their own VMs, the user in SSP do not have any rights to administrate other users in SSP. The rights of users in SSP can be assigned by using SCVMM Console.

Self-Provisioning

By using VMM SSP, end users will be allowed to self-provision and manage their own VMs by using the web interface. The web interface is simple and user friendly as shown above. The provisioned VMs are based on VM template. The VM template is created in SCVMM Console by SCVMM administrators.

In the same time, the user also allows to connect and remote desktop to the VMs using web interface.

Simple and user friendly web interface for end user

This interface of SSP is simple and can be understand easily.

Assign user rights according to user type

The administrator can assign different rights to end user according to user type. The screenshot above shown the rights assigned to the user group. The administrator also able to assign the VM to deploy to particular Hyper-V host group based to respective user type. For example, user type A will only deploy VM to Hyper-V host group A.

Set boundary to users to avoid excessive provisioning

SSP allows end user to self-provision VMs for themselves, however, if the VM deployment didn’t controlled properly, this will lead to resources depletion.

SSP introduce Quota Point to allow administrator to control resource allocation effectively. Administrator can assign a maximum quota to a user group, and also quota point required for deployment on VM templates. End user able to provision VMs, and the quota points will be deducted after the provisioning, the point deducted is based on quota point of template.

By using Quota Point feature, administrator can assign the VMs template quota point based on how much resource consumed for deployment. For example, assign 2 quota points for a VM required 4GB of RAM, and 1 quota point for VM required 2GB of RAM. Indirectly, administrator can keep track of software license used by end user.

Extras

During the first time I remote accessed to VM using computer out of domain, the SSP prompted me for domain user and password when I trying to access to VM. This is because the computer does not have credentials to access the resources in the domain. As for Win 7, it will prompt for user name and password, however in Win XP, the web interface will prompt error and without asking for credentials.

In order to overcome this problem, on the login page of SSP, select Store my credentials. This will allows SSP to carry the credentials entered in this page to access VM within the domain. It is quite useful for computer out of domain.

It is recommended to update all VMs version into latest version to make VMs compatible with SSP. I have faced this problem during my Win XP deployment, where the VM unable to be remote accessed via web interface as the Win XP version is SP2, after I updated it to SP3, it has no problem to be remote accessed via web interface.