It has been a long journey for the evolution of App Controller. We will be discussing how this component evolved during the last couple of iterations of the VMM product.

App Controller is a component of the System Center family. Historically, it used to be the self-service portal in the Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 server. With the release of the System Center 2012 suite, Microsoft consolidated SCCM, SCOM, VMM, SCSM, Orchestrator, Data Protection Manager, and Software Update Publisher (SUP) as a single-bundle software suite to manage enterprise data centers. With the release of System Center 2012 Service Pack 1, the system center's virtual machine manager self-service portal was removed from Virtual Machine Manager Server and distributed as System Center App Controller. It was a well-timed change, as Microsoft was addressing its move towards a Cloud OS-centric approach.

To date, System Center App Controller is an extension of Virtual Machine Manager. It adds further functionality to Virtual Machine Manager by exposing role-based access control for users consuming resources allocated in the private cloud, as well as adding functionality to manage public cloud services such as Microsoft Azure.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: