System Center Essentials and the Self Service Portal

I was looking at the Self Service Portal (SSP),  a free add-on to System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), recently and wondered if this would work alongside System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE) to create a basic private cloud.  If you haven heard of  the SSP it enables business users to request services run up virtual machines etc. and to be charged monthly for the amount of resources they use.

I did get it all working after quite a bit of work, but I am pretty sure it’s not supported, so I have decided not to post the videos at the moment or to include it in the series I did on SCE Sunday. If you want to try it yourself you’ll need to do the following, and it should work for you:

1. Get the SSP from here

2. Install the Message Queuing (MSMQ) feature with Directory Services Integration enabled.

3. Run some PowerShell to

#create a host group

New-VMHostGroup MyHostGroup

# add my VM host to it

Move-VMHost –VMHost MyHost –ParentHostGroup MyHostgroup

as SCE doesn’t understand the concept of host groups, and this works because hidden under the covers of SCE, pretty much all of SCVMM is there except the user interface, and the SSP is essentially a solutions accelerator with PowerShell scripts to work its magic.

If this is of interest I will do some more research, and you should also put your comments on Microsoft Connect.