In 2005 during an internship at my time at Hewlett-Packard I created a web interface to control and deploy virtual machines on a VMware ESX Server.
The HP OpenView test center was using many dedicated machines in their data center for testing. However, most machines were requested by developers for tests and never returned to the pool. The introduction of a new VMware ESX Server allowed the use of virtual machines to test Open View, but the Server didn’t give enough control over access rights.
It was therefore my job to create a web interface with which developers could create and manage virtual machines for testing purposes. The machines were shut down automatically each night and developers had to start them again in the morning. This saved HP a ton of servers.
The project was implemented in about 8 weeks. The interface was built in Perl and connected to the VMware ESX Server with SOAP. Active Directory was used for user authentication.
