My boss is interested in building a cloud hosting infrastructure, and part of his vision is a control panel from which virtual servers and workstations can be created and provisioned with a single command. Additionally, basic commands such as user creation should be performed equally easily. He has seen EMS Cortex (now owned by Citrix) and is very impressed, but is not interested in paying the license fees, so he is looking for ways to roll our own poor man's Cortex which may not be as complete, but does the basics.
Since our infrastructure is entirely Windows, I was thinking I could build a control panel that connects to a web service on each host server that runs powershell scripts from a directory. That way the web service could be the same whether it is running on the domain controller or the mail server or the SQL server or what have you, and the library of actions could be updated by updating the library of powershell scripts
Am I making things too complicated? Is there a better way?
