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)

Configuring the new categories

Now, at this stage, before starting to use the new activities available, we need to configure the base options for them.

Active Directory

We'll take Active Directory as a sample for now. You'll need to set the domain configuration in order to advance and be able to use it during the execution of your Runbooks and in the activities you use. This is referred to as a connection, which is a reusable link between Orchestrator and as many Active Directory Domain Controllers as you need or are necessary.

In order to configure this prerequisite, you'll need to navigate to Options | Active Directory on your Runbook Designer bar menu that will present you the following screen:

Active Directory

You then need to add a new Active Directory connection and configure it accordingly, as the following screenshot suggests:

Active Directory

A brief explanation of these settings is as follows:

  • Name: We will suggest something that identifies the domain to which this connection belongs, like the example...