As you grow your vCommander® deployment, your service catalog will expand as you offer more and more services to a wider variety of customers. This is especially true when you are providing multi-tenant services to a variety of organizations. To make sure that their self-service experience is as smooth and efficient as possible, it’s important to make sure the service catalog is well organized. You can do so by making sure that only relevant services are offered to customers, naming services appropriately, using meaningful icons and categories.


Offering Relevant Services

The best way to optimize your Service Catalog is to make sure that services are only ever offered to customers who need them. This prevents customers from having to hunt through a busy catalog to find the VMs, vApps, and unmanaged components that they actually need.


Even if you already have a flat service catalog, where all services are offered to all users, it’s very easy to update the service to refine who sees it.

  1. Under the Configuration menu, choose Service Request Configuration.
  2. Click Edit for an existing service you want to update.

  3. In the Edit Service dialog, click Next until you get to the Visibility page.
  4. Choose Publish – Specific Users  and enter the email address of each user or group who should see the service, and click Add.

  5. Click Finish.

Make the same decision, as relevant, for each new service you add to your catalog going forward.

Naming Services

By default, vCommander will name the services you add to the service catalog with the name of the VM or template on which it’s based. For users that are very familiar with your virtualization infrastructure and corporate naming policies, this may provide enough detail to understand what’s being offered. However, it’s always best to design clarity in for new customers who come on board as you ramp up your deployment or staffing turnover occurs.

  1. Under the Configuration menu, choose Service Request Configuration.
  2. Click Edit for an existing service you want to update.

  3. Update the Name and Description as relevant, and click Finish..



Using Meaningful Icons

Most users will stick with the default icon view of the service catalog, so making sure that the services use icons that clearly identify the OS and purpose is essential. Some icons are available for use out of the box, covering many of the most popular services.


You can add icons using GIF, JPG or PNG files not exceeding 1 MB. For best results, use icons which are 48 x 48 pixels.


There are a few open source libraries available, from which you can choose icons suitable for your needs, although any file meeting the requirements stating above will work.


To add icons to vCommander, follow the steps below.

  1. Under the Configuration menu, choose Service Request Configuration
  2. Switch to the Service Catalog tab.
  3. Click Icons in the search bar.

  4. Click Add.
  5. Browse to and select the icon file, and click Open.
  6. Click Close.


Using Meaningful Categories

Especially important when you have a large service catalog, service portal users filter the list using categories that you have created and assigned to services. Typically, categories include those which identify:

  • Guest operating system
  • VM configuration
  • Production vs. lab/staging
  • Purpose

To add categories to vCommander, follow the steps below.

  1. Under the Configuration menu, choose Service Request Configuration.
  2. Switch to the Service Catalog tab.
  3. Click Categories in the search bar.
  4. Enter the Category Name and click Add. Use the Up and Down buttons to adjust the order of the categories in the list, which is also how they will appear in the service portal. Click OK when finished.