I’m still taking in all of the sights and sounds of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The What’s New page is very interesting. Some of the things listed are apparently even in the product. But not this:
Thoroughly redesigned and rebuilt Web interface for the self-service portal, including user access to the PowerShell interface and commandlets.
I mistook that statement to mean that somehow self-service portal users would have the ability to run PowerShell scripts right from the web portal. I mean, it is one sentence. After scouring the documentation and asking for clarification, it was revealed that this is not the case at all.
It turns out that these self-service portal users actually need to install the SCVMM administrator console on their machines, which they cannot even use, in order to have the means to run PowerShell scripts using the standard shell, not the web portal.
Now I think I understand: Read any bullet on the page, but stop at the last comma. The portion after the last comma is highly suspect. Let’s test the hypothesis on another bullet:
As a feature of VMM 2008, PRO’s capabilities are also available to VMware ESX or Virtual Server hosts, thus allowing administrators to manage their entire virtualized environment regardless of the virtualization platform they are using.
Oh yes, it looks like I may have cracked the code. Read my article on ESX and PRO Tips and see for yourself.
