Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013

Users who are part of the newly created group can then access the cloud and associated virtual machine

templates and service templates through the VMM console or, for a true self-service experience, through

System Center 2012 SP1 App Controller.

App Controller

Among the advantages of a private cloud is the ability to quickly provision and deprovision compute,

networking, and storage resources through virtual machines. With System Center 2012 SP1 App

Controller, IT administrators in your organization can give certain users (such as Exchange administrators)

the ability to access and consume private and public cloud infrastructure by self-provisioning

standardized virtual machines in a controlled environment. This helps to reduce administrative overhead

and improve time to market.

When an Exchange administrator logs on to the App Controller interface, an overview screen is

dynamically generated based on identity and shows what the administrator can access (Figure 47). By

selecting the Clouds option, as shown, the Exchange administrator sees accessible clouds. Note that the

Exchange administrator has access to the Exchange cloud, of which a significant amount of capacity has

already been used.

Figure 47: Using App Controller to access an Exchange private cloud as the Exchange administrator

In Figure 48, when Virtual Machines is selected, a list appears of the current virtual machines that are

visible to this particular Exchange administrator. It is important to note here that the Exchange

administrator sees only the virtual machines that the IT administrator has specifically provided and

enabled for consumption. The Exchange administrator does not see the rest of the virtual machines on a

particular host or cluster, even though this person’s own virtual machines may be running on those hosts

or clusters. In addition, the Exchange administrator can perform only certain tasks on the virtual machine;

in this example, the Exchange administrator cannot pause or save virtual machines, but can start, stop,

shutdown, and deploy new virtual machines.