How is the management portal for administrators associated with Service Provider Foundation?
Applies To: Windows Azure Pack
Service Provider Foundation is available as part of System Center 2012 Orchestrator and exposes an extensible OData API over a REST web service that provides a programmatic interface to Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) (or management ‘stamp’, as each instance of VMM Server is referred to). Service Provider Foundation can be configured to interact with a maximum of five stamps. Stamps, in turn, are a logical boundary that includes System Center Virtual Machine Manager, one or more virtual machine hosts, and the virtual machines that are managed in the context of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager instance that is included in the stamp. A good example for use of stamps can be datacenters that are spread across the geographies. For example, you can have one stamp that represents a data center in Asia, while you have another stamp that represents a data center in Europe. For more information on Service Provider Foundation, stamps, and other related concepts and components, see Service Provider Foundation. The following illustration depicts how management portal for administrators, Service Management API, and Service Provider Foundation integrate to provide the VM Clouds service.
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Note
You will typically have more than one instance of Operations Manager associated with multiple instances of VMM Server.
From the management portal for administrators, when you register the Service Provider Foundation endpoint with the portal, you essentially register a connection between the Service Management API and Service Provider Foundation. Because Service Provider Foundation provides a programmatic interface to the stamps, it enables service providers and large enterprise organizations to design and implement multi-tenant self-service portals that integrate IaaS capabilities available through System Center 2012 R2. Once you register Service Provider Foundation with the management portal for administrators, you extend that ability to the portal as well via the Service Management API. After you register the Service Provider Foundation endpoint:
Any stamps that you create in Service Provider Foundation are listed as stamps in the management portal for administrators.
Any clouds that you create in the VMM server (that has Service Provider Foundation installed) appear as clouds in the management portal for administrators.
You can register more stamps with Service Provider Foundation by using the management portal for administrators.
You can remove the association between a stamp and Service Provider Foundation.
For more information on how to register a Service Provider Foundation endpoint with the management portal for administrators, see Register the Service Provider Foundation Endpoint for Virtual Machine Clouds.