Microsoft has released version 2.0 of the Self Service Portal for its System Center Virtual Machine Manager product. The product which was announced in July this year during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, is an add-on for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.
The Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal (VMMSSP) is a stand-alone product which can coexist with the already existing self-service portal. The differencing functionality in this version 2.0 of the portal is that the self-service portal provides a way to delegate IT management to groups (called business units within the tool) within an organization while the central organization manages the centralized pool of physical resources (servers, networks, and related hardware).
Besides that the portal can be extended by ISVs through XML.
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.
- Customization 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: Standardized forms and a simple workflow for registering and approving or rejecting business units to enroll in the portal.
- Infrastructure request and change management: Standardized 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.