Granting Users Access to the Private Cloud
I’ve talked about installing the SCVMM management console for end-user access, but
this is really not practical. Although it has full role-based access control, it requires a
client to be deployed on every machine. Instead, the preferred interface for users is via
a web browser that enables users to provision, manage, and control their resources.
System Center 2012 R2 had a component called App Controller, as noted previously in
this chapter. This was Silverlight based, very thin, and simply deployed, and provided a
web interface for users to interact with the following:
Clouds defined in SCVMM
Clouds in Azure
Clouds at hosting partners who leverage Service Provider FoundationIt was an intuitive interface, and it made basic provisioning and management across
clouds simple. However, it had no ability to integrate with workflow engines to enable
provisioning as part of any approval or larger process. In System Center 2016, App
Controller has been removed, which leaves many wondering how to expose clouds to
end users.
Enabling Workflows and Advanced Private Cloud Concepts by Using
Service Manager and Orchestrator
System Center Orchestrator provides two primary great capabilities. It can
communicate with many systems and automate defined series of activities that can
span many systems through runbooks. These two capabilities can be highly beneficial
to your private cloud implementation.
At the most basic level, Orchestrator can be leveraged to create virtual machines,
deploy service templates, and even create entire clouds through runbooks. In Figure
9.13, I show a basic runbook that receives initialization data, makes a call to SCVMM
to create a VM, and then runs PowerShell to configure ownership of the VM.