Orange Data Centre part 5– Installing Self Service Portal

First an apology. One of the reasons I stopped trying to turn my laptop into a mobile data centre was that I have been a login to the Reading Microsoft Technology Centre (MTC) and this has the entire system centre suite running on it and my Dell Covet can’t really compete with that.  However I don’t have total control over it and when I tried to setup the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) self service portal (SSP) on it it died during my recent Techdays online session on Planning the Private Cloud. So back to plan A  - setup my own environment including the Self service Portal.

The current Self Service Portal (version 2) is essentially a solution accelerator and you can download that from here

I have a short video on installing it here and that is all pretty straightforward, but as with other System Center products it needs it’s own SQL Server database..

The only hiccup I had was turning on MSMQ (a feature in Windows Server 2008 and later), as you also need to enable the Directory Integration mode for MSMQ and although I had enabled it took some time for the pre-requisite check in the SSP install to pick this up.  However while installing it is pretty straight forward setting it up and allowing your users to start creating their own services and virtual machines requires more thought not because the portal is hard to use but it requires an understanding of the terminology and approach.  And that’s what I’ll be doing in my next post in this series