Take Control of the Virtual Machine Lifecycle

Users can log into the VMware Lifecycle Manager Web portal to see a catalog of the virtual machines in various states and power on machines that have been deployed. Users can also see previous requests.

When users create new requests, they must enter details such as when they need a particular virtual machine and how long it will be in use. Users can also leverage VMware Lifecycle Manager’s support for Active Directory (or Open LDAP) by defining who can use or see a virtual machine. Users can request virtual machines for themselves or on behalf of a larger group.

All virtual machine requests can be routed to an approver within the business. The approver can view each specific request and approve or reject it based on specific business requirements, such as cost, length of request or amount of available resources.

The IT staff role enables IT to select between multiple resources, such as resource pools, that can fulfill a particular virtual machine request. Once IT makes a placement decision, the virtual machine will be automatically deployed.

The IT administrator defines both the selection criteria and how those criteria map to available computing resources. This resource pool will be made available to all geographic locations and organizations that request virtual machine resources.

Setting up virtual machine templates is a key part of the administrator’s role. You can create an unlimited number of templates, but only those that are published to the user will be available for selection. In addition, chargeback metrics can be associated with each template.