The Provisioning Concept

Servers and Virtual Servers
Hosting Plans, Customers and Hosting Spaces

The following chapter will describe the provisioning concept. Within the concept available service offerings and the server components that will do the actual provisioning are combined to virtual servers. The virtual servers are the foundation for hosting plans customer can subscribe to.

A hosting plan contains all or a selection of the available services within a specific virtual server with the definition of the boundaries (quotas) for each specific service offering. Server providers typically apply a different pricing scheme to different hosting plans.

Once a new customer signs up a primary administration account will be created, this account will be stored within the WebsitePanel environment. Administrators do have the ability to create so-called peer accounts to have the ability to delegate the administration task to another person/account

Once the customer administration account is created a hosting space based on a hosting plan will be created for the customer. In order to finalize the initial provisioning process a primary domain will be created. The customer administrator has from this point the capabilities to create new user accounts, assign service offerings to this account and maintain his own environment within the boundaries of the hosting plan.

Servers and Virtual Servers

The servers are the WebsitePanel server component, each server system that will be an interaction point for the WebsitePanel Enterprise Server will have the WebsitePanel server component installed. The servers and the service offerings that will be provisioned through the WebsitePanel server component will be defined within the configuration of the website panel.

During the configuration, low level configuration information regarding the server will need to be provided.

The following screenshot shows a typical server configuration for a Domain Controller

Within the Control Panel it is essential that the root organizational unit for hosted organizations is defined as “Microsoft Exchange Hosted Organizations” in order to ensure all AD object for the various service offerings are created within the same Organizational Unit.

 

A typical deployment will contain various servers and server components for the specific service offerings

The various defined server components (services) are combined into a virtual server:

Hosting plans, customers and hosting spaces

A hosting plan contains definitions of boundaries (quotas) for the various service offerings that are part of the hosting plan

 

 

Once the primary customer administration account is created a hosting space has to be created

Once the hosting space is created, the environment can be managed by the organization administrator. The Hosted Organizations offering is the central entry point for management of the customer environment