Book Image

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 R2 Essentials

By : Oliveira
Book Image

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 R2 Essentials

By: Oliveira

Overview of this book

With the increasing complexity of systems in our infrastructure designs, administrating these systems has become more complex and repetitive. This ultimately translates into an inefficient environment and loss of time. System Center Orchestrator 2012 R2 is the tool that can help you regain that time again, by simplifying repetitive tasks (or complex ones) into a simple one that will require minimum intervention from you, or even none. This technology will drive you one step forward towards a more dynamic infrastructure and can also be used to make a customized Private Cloud environment setup. Starting off with the fundamentals of Orchestrator, this book helps you to learn the configuration and deployment of the Orchestrator 2012 R2 in a corporate environment to successfully deploy and mitigate real-life issues that you might encounter. You’ll learn the most used part of Orchestrator, the Runbook Designer, with all its components and mechanisms to help you efficiently design and implement your Runbooks from top to bottom. Additionally, you will also get familiarized with configuring key Integration Packs available for Orchestrator to extend its functionality and enhance the automation solution. Furthermore, you will explore the possibilities of extending and integrating Orchestrator with other parties and learn to set up core infrastructure administrative tasks that can save time and effort when automated with Orchestrator. You finally round off by gaining insights on the maintenance aspects of Orchestrator, while simultaneously covering the troubleshooting, backup, and recovery features.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Runbooks overview

OK, so we've been talking a lot about Runbooks, but we haven't really discussed them in depth. Well, it's time to do that! We've included this part in the middle of the Runbook Designer section because they are both so interconnected that it will be easier and more practical to address them together, while maintaining focus over the Runbook itself.

Before we start building Runbooks, we need to understand the basics that are related to concepts, design principles, and understanding the fundamental building blocks of Runbooks.

These are shown in the following list:

  • Naming, version management, and folders
  • Smart links
  • Published data and the data bus
  • Global settings (counters, variables, and schedules)
  • Subscription and data manipulation
  • Looping
  • Runbook control
  • Runbook design recommendations

Naming, version management, and folders

There's no best practice in terms of Runbook management and organization, so it's up to you to define how you want to keep your...