The self-service portal is one of the best features of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM – I have to say I can’t get used to the new name – Carmine still sounds more familiar), as it allows administrators to define policies for creating Virtual Machines, and then users themselves can create new VMs that comply with the limits set by IT (i.e.: Guest OS, amount of RAM, hard drive, etc). This greatly improves the efficiency of IT departments, and allows end-users to take control of the server and workstation provisioning process into their own hands.
During the development of our labs, we run into several issues with the Self-Service portal of SCVMM . After going through all the process to create templates and hardware and guest profiles, we kept running into issues with the template being disabled in the self-service portal. Well, it turns out that the issues had nothing to do with SCVMM itself, but with the configuration on the target Virtual Server. Here are some points in the Virtual Server configuration you should check if you ever run into similar problems (the error messages are not that descriptive):
- The host have enough RAM and disk space for the new VM
- The host must have a default path for Virtual Machines. You can check this one on the web management console of Virtual Server, under Server Properties->Search paths->Default virtual machine configuration folder.
- The host must have sufficient network adapters to support the amount specified in the template.
Our test Virtual Server installation, the default path was missing. Be sure to check these points out if you ever run into a similar situation!