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)

Runbook for Workstation Power Saving

For this Runbook sample, we will target workstations that are usually left up and running by users during the night, and we'll use it to force those machines to shutdown.

This is a very basic Runbook and works on the assumption that you have a computer group containing a list of machines that are not respecting the outside working hours, or all the workstations in the company.

So, following this example and keeping it in mind, we'll have the following Runbook at the end of this exercise:

Runbook for Workstation Power Saving

Again, we'll keep it short in terms of explanations as by now, you'll be able to decode what's going on in this Runbook and even design your own just by taking this as a sample for your needs.

We'll start by using a Monitor Date/Time activity that we'll configure to be trigged every day at 8:30 P.M., and we'll follow it with Get Machine Status, which will verify the machine's availability by ping. This activity will be a subscription...