SCVMM 2008 R2 Installation defaults and Self Service Portal

SCVMM is an excellent product for managing your Hyper-V environment. The Self Service Portal (SSP), a component of the SCVMM install, allows end users to manage and deploy VM’s remotely. However, but sure to read the fine print when installing.

During the installation process, you will be prompted to select what ports the VMM Agent will use when communicating with the Hyper-V host. The default ports WinRM and BITS use are 80 and 443 respectively. If you plan on running the Self Service Portal from the same host system, you will either need to change the ports the VMM Agent uses or change the ports the Self Service Portal uses.

Since browsers and IIS always default to 80 and 443 for HTTP and HTTPS, I would recommend making the change to the VMM Agent. Port 8080 for the VMM Agent control port (WinRM) and 8443 for the VMM Agent data port (BITS) are nice alternatives. Note that using a different IP for the SSP is NOT an option, as WinRM and BITS will self-configure to listen on all IP addresses thereby hijacking the ports.

A quick note, changing the default ports is recommended if you are planning on running ANY website on the same box. For instance, we had initially installed SCVMM on the same box running Operations Manager. It wasn’t until our VM migrations began failing that we realized the default installation of SCVMM was being interfered with the Operations Manager Console which was also running on the same system.

Lastly, you may not even receive an error of any type when having this issue – rather, the SSP simply won’t install. You may see behavior similar to this:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/virtualmachinemanager/thread/bba52f08-7b95-4a74-9c9b-ceaf0499e29c/#1dbef478-f896-48e4-af4e-b455d120c10b