System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 (SCVMM SSP 2.0), formerly known as the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit, and better known as the front end of the Microsoft Private Cloud, is now available and supported in production usage.
“VMMSSP (also referred to as the self-service portal) is a fully supported, partner-extensible solution built on top of Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, and System Center VMM. You can use it to pool, allocate, and manage resources to offer infrastructure as a service and to deliver the foundation for a private cloud platform inside your datacenter. VMMSSP includes a pre-built web-based user interface that has sections for both the datacenter managers and the business unit IT consumers, with role-based access control. VMMSSP also includes a dynamic provisioning engine. VMMSSP reduces the time needed to provision infrastructures and their components by offering business unit “on-boarding,” infrastructure request and change management. The VMMSSP package also includes detailed guidance on how to implement VMMSSP inside your environment.”
This is an alternative self-service portal for SCVMM 2008 R2. It has two different architectures. A one-server solution contains the 3 components. A 3 server solution has the database, service and portal each on different servers.
The idea is that a business (such as a corporation or a university) can build a shared services data centre. Business units can be allocated with resources from that pool. They will be billed a basic rate, e.g. for allocated disk space. The business units can then deploy virtual machines on their own without requiring assistance from IT. They are then billed based on usage, e.g. you might base that on CPU/RAM.
This means you run Infrastructure-as-a-Service and the business (probably developers, faculty IT, departmental IT, etc) all subscribe to a service that is subject to an SLA (monitored, of course, by System Center Operations Manager!).
The whole thing is extensible. Examples of this include allocating physical disk to the backend Hyper-V hosts, configuring physical networking, etc. Hardware partners are expected to provide some expertise here. With some knowledge, you can do this yourself.
Partners that are listed include:
- Citrix Integration Pack for Self-Service Portal
- Compellent Solution Pack for Self-Service Portal
- F5 Solution for Self-Service Portal
- HP services using Self-Service Portal
- Intel Cloud Builder Guide: Cloud Design and Deployment on Intel Platforms
- NetApp ApplianceWatch PRO 2.1.1
- VKernel Chargeback with Hyper-V
This is the first step in the MS Private Cloud. SCVMM 2012 (or v.Next) has some very cool service template functionality that adds automated elasticity (auto-deploy servers into roles) and support for Server App-V to abstract IIS/SQL.