The SC VMM VM viewer uses a separate window from the main GUI (a plug-in is required to see VMware VMs). Unfortunately, the options available from within the viewer itself are limited. You can reconnect to host, send ctrl-alt-delete commands, and use all of the real estate of the monitor. There are no start/stop, shutdown or pause buttons available from the viewer.

Every time we clicked inside to give focus to the viewer while installing a VM, it would pop up with the message, "You can't control the mouse while running a remote session without virtual tools installed." This was very annoying because when we installed a SLES VM onto a Hyper-V server, we couldn't even use the mouse, and still had trouble using the VM afterwards trying to install the Hyper-V Linux components.

While working with ESX machines, we could not turn off the ESX machines remotely, as is possible with ESX Infrastructure Client (like shutdown, reboot or enter maintenance mode for the physical machine). Secondly, we were not able to use templates created in ESX within the SC VMM interface. Therefore, it is still necessary to use VMware's client for certain tasks, and we wondered why we would use SC VMM when we had to reference VMware's utilities anyway.

Besides the primary SC VMM administrator role, there are two other roles -- a delegated administrative role, and a self-service user role. The user and group management scheme uses existing Active Directory roles, so there is no need to create new ones. We just assign those users VM management duties from within the SC VMM GUI. We were also able to restrict the actions users could perform on the VM using self-service users role establishment. The available actions are start, stop, checkpoint (similar to the snapshot feature with other tools), remote desktop control, pause/resume, shutdown and remove.

You can place deeper restrictions on VMs if you tap into the concept of Host groups. This allows users to create new virtual machines, setting a quota of how many VMs can be created or if users can store the VMs in the Library.