Virtualisation hosting / options with self management for our clients

Hey guys,

I need some ideas and real life experience from you :)

We run a SaaS environment for our customers and because of some requests, we also provide something like "IaaS" now. Usually we managed everything, but that IaaS part seems to grow, so we need a more solid solution. So far we set up a VM, prepare it and give it to the customer, but they can't do anything like shutdown / restart or snapshots. That's where our manual labour comes into play. And that's what we want the customer to be able to do themself.

We run only VMWare, but are already testing other hypervisors, a mixed environment wouldn't be an issue on our side. For VMWare, we already had the idea to setup a new vcenter just for the IaaS and the customer can login with restricted rights, but we're not sure we can do this so much in detail. At best it would be a temporary option.

We are seeking an option, to give customers their own portal to config and setup their VMs with a lot more freedom. Like console access, snapshots and so on. With us defining the limits in vCPUs, RAM and others. There wouldn't be any direct access over the internet like a typical Webhoster.

So, I would be interested to hear, what you guys are using or what you know. As I said, hypervisor etc. doesn't matter, especially as we are still collecting ideas. It's really just about managing for now, so the customers can do their own stuff without our help. We don't need automatic invoicing or something like that.

Thanks for your input :)