HyperV IaaS ,SCVMM and the Cobweb Control Panel

Cobweb provides many products other than Exchange. Through our Control Panel customers can choose web hosting, CRM, Sharepoint, Office Communication Server (Lync coming soon), Backup products, you name it.

A product we recently launched is dedicated virtual machines using Microsoft HyperV R2 with SP1.

We can provide dedicated Windows 2008 R2 vm's to customers, spinning them up on demand based on customers needs.

I recently trialled this service so thought i'd post on how easy the entire experience is.


Normally my login to the Control Panel looks like this. You can see I make use of many feature rich products and services

















Using a trial customer account I tried the HyperV product. You can see below that just HyperV is present. This is because this trial account does not have any other products or services assigned. If for example I wanted to purchase HyperV on my actual subscription, the HyperV option would be present with all the other services I currently have. This provides a seamless end user experience when managing all your Cloud applications and services from the Provider.

















So I was interested in what I could do with the virtual machine via the Control Panel. This is the view I was presented with when looking at the actual service. The two main options are Virtual Machine configuration and Parallels Plesk.

















So if I drill down into Virtual Machine configuration you'll see I have quite a few options. Firstly I have some pretty basic functionality like being able to start, stop or shutdown the virtual machine. Secondly I can manage lease IP addresses - this allows me to assign more public IP addresses to the server, should I need multiple addresses assigned.

Finally I can configure my virtual machine for vCPU, ram and disk. This is all purchased through billing, and once purchased immediately available to assign to my vm's.

















At the top is the Remote Console, when clicking this I can then get direct access through the browser to administer my vm via RDP over HTTPs. This is provided to the end user via SCVMM (System Centre Virtual Machine Manager) and is part of the SCCM suite.

















Out of the box direct RDP isn't available, but this is just a service desk call away to get configured - remember, you'll ideally need a static IP address to manage them this way.



Take Care


Oliver Moazzezi MVP - Exchange Server