App Controller Management Portal

System Center 2012 App Controller is a self-service portal for Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) that was previously code-named Concero. It allows organizations to delegate computing resource management to business units using either centralized Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs) on-premises or on Windows Azure. App Controller allows users with delegated role-based access to provision compute, network, and storage resources and to tailor VM actions such as scripting interactions with storage area networks and bulk creation of VMs. The portal will be attractive to organizations that want to delegate service provisioning and management to business units to leverage hardware in a shared data center or at a hosting provider such as Microsoft.

Self-Service for Business Units

Announced at the Mar. 2011 Microsoft Management Summit, App Controller is included in System Center 2012. It is an application for IIS, the built-in Windows Web server, that provides both Silverlight and PowerShell interfaces to VMM and Windows Azure to deliver a common management tool for business unit owners of applications or services, such as database or human resources applications. App Controller allows those users to deploy, manage, and control applications and services in private or partner-hosted virtualized data centers built using System Center VMM 2012, and in the Microsoft-hosted Windows Azure cloud platform, without worrying about individual VMs or storage provisioning. (See the illustration “App Controller Console“.)