Self-Service Portal - Ideal for exposing your test VMs

Want to be able to share your isolated test machines without connecting them to your corporate network ?

It`s possible with SCVMM 2008 R2 and the Self Service Portal.

Let`s assume that everything is installed, and the VMs need to be accessible over the network without being physical (or virtual) attached.

In SCVMM, you create a new user role, so you can assign the VMs to the portal.

1. Navigate to the administration view
2. Click 'User Role'
3. Click 'New User Role' from the actions pane to get to the 'Create User Role Wizard'

After providing a name for your new user role (And selected the Self-Service User profile), click next to add members to this user role.

Add a user or a group from Active Directory.

On the the 'Select Scope' page, check the host groups to which you want this new user role to have access (This is very important. If you`re not checking the host group where the VMs will be placed, they will not appear in the Self-Service portal).

On the Virtual Machine permission page, you can specify what action this new role can take on the VMs in the scope. I would recommend that you uncheck the 'Checkpoint' if you are running the VMs in Failover Clustering, since it will  create a differencial disk (.avhd).

The next page shows the Library Share.This is where you allow users to store virtual machines in the library which this user role has access.

The next page is the summary of what you`ve been up to.

After you`ve finished, you have to assign an owner to the VMs that you want to expose in the Self-Service Portal.

Navigate to 'Virtual Machines' in SCVMM, right click the VMs, select 'Properties', and select the same group from Active Directory that you assigned the newly created User Role.

You can now log on to your Self-Service Portal, and see the selected VMs.
The reason why you can log on to your VMs without connecting them to your network, is that your SCVMM connects to the Hyper-V host through VMConnect.exe (default on port 2179).
(Also make sure your VMs have the intergration services installed prior to this)


When you now log on to your Self-Service Portal, you should see the selected VMs.