Sudo Self Service

[mdterp]

I am pretty new to VMware and all the cool stuff you can do with it and am curious if my scenario makes sense to try and accomplish and how I could go about doing it.  I do NOT want a step by step, more just a use THIS. 

I have a Windows AD domain with probably up to 100 VM ESX 4, 5, and 5.1 hosts.  Each at a different site.  We are not using vCenter Server to manage the sites.  Really we so over bought for each site it is amazing, and we are only running 2 or 3 VMs.

What I would like to do is create some space within the ESX server(s) at each site to allow some of the local IT people to spin up VMs for testing purposes without having access to the actual production machines.  Somewhat of a self-service portal.  I do not want to implement vcloud director, or even really automate much for the deployment.  At the least consider the idea that a user could create a VM and mount and .iso to make their VM.  At some point we might get to ovf and templates, but for now we just want to allow some people to create a VM to test with.

I was thinking resource pools with permissions.  Any thoughts as to a better way?

[weinstein5]

The easiest way would be to invest in vCenter - the permissions in vCenter are much more granular and will alow to assign the appropriaye permission using the users AD accounts -

[mdterp]

I have vCenter available to me and can employ it at each site or a group of sites in linked mode.  I am familiar with the AD permissions that I can set on Resource Pools and Datastores among other things.

Right now I am messing with the resource pool idea and have it locked down so my users can create VMs and they will only go into a certain resource pool and only in a certain datastore.  It keeps them away from the production VMs very well.  But I am struggling with understanding how the resource pools help keep the performance of my production VMs up to par.  I can over commit resources in the pool.

[mdterp]

With vCenter deployed I am able to create resource pools with specific permissions to allow some users to create VMs within the pool.

The downside is that when a VM is moved from one pool to another they do not inherit the permissions of that resource pool.  You manually (or via script) have to redo the permissions on the VM once it has been moved.