service catalog is primarily available to end users through a SharePoint site that uses
Service Manager Silverlight web parts. Users can browse the service catalog as a single
go-to place for all of their needs, which makes it a perfect place to offer virtual services
on the private cloud. How do you offer the private cloud services in the service
catalog? You add the runbooks from Orchestrator, and then when a user makes a
request from the service catalog, the standard Service Manager workflows can be used
such as request authorization. Then the workflow calls the runbook in Orchestrator to
perform the actions. Service Manager and Orchestrator have great bidirectional
communications in System Center, allowing the status of the runbook execution to be
visible within Service Manager, as shown in Figure 9.14. Once the process is complete,
the service request is marked as completed, and the user can even be sent an email. I
walk through creating this type of service by using Service Manager in a video at
http://youtu.be/T1jTX9xE66A.
Figure 9.14 Service catalog view in Service Manager of request offerings that call
Orchestrator runbooks
Service Manager also has the ability to create charge-back price sheets that allow
prices to be assigned to various aspects of the virtual environment—such as price per
day for the VM; price per core, memory, and storage per day; and then additional
items such as a price for a highly available VM or static IP address. These price sheets
can then be used within Service Manager to allow charge-back to business units based
on their utilization.