Book Image

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 R2 Essentials

Book Image

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 R2 Essentials

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)

Security


As in any other tool or technology present in your environment, Orchestrator also has a security layer that can be worked and defined to avoid unauthorized access or prevent the misuse of Runbooks or the service.

Until this point in this book, you've seen which firewall ports to configure for Orchestrator to work and communicate properly, which service accounts to set and for what reason in Active Directory, and even which security groups to create in order to segregate the service access and rights for execution of tasks within Orchestrator, or execution of Runbooks.

Within the Runbooks, you might find yourself having to include or insert passwords for certain activities to execute, and therefore, leaving those passwords in plain text. We discourage you to do so, and instead to use the encrypted variable functionality so that you can protect that sensitive information.

Regarding the Orchestrator access, we've defined three types of groups in Chapter 1, Configuring and Deploying Orchestrator...