Book Image

Microsoft System Center 2016 Orchestrator Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Michael Seidl, Steve Beaumont, Samuel Erskine (EUR), Andreas Baumgarten
Book Image

Microsoft System Center 2016 Orchestrator Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Michael Seidl, Steve Beaumont, Samuel Erskine (EUR), Andreas Baumgarten

Overview of this book

With Microsoft System Center 2016 Orchestrator Cookbook, you will start by learning how to efficiently install and secure System Center Orchestrator. You will then learn how you can create configuration files for SCO 2016. After initial installation and configuration, you will soon be planning and creating functional and fault-tolerant System Center runbooks to automate daily tasks and routine operations. Next you will delve into runbooks; you will learn how to create powerful and advanced runbooks such as Building your Runbook without a Dead End. You will also learn to create simple and advanced runbooks for your daily tasks. Towards the end of the book, you will learn to use SCO for other interesting tasks and also learn to maintain and perform SCO health checks. By the end of the book, you will be able to automate your administrative tasks successfully with SCO.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Making the Orchestrator environment highly available

SCO features and components can be installed on a single server or across multiple servers. All SCO components can be installed multiple times, except the Management Server. The Management Server and his SQL database can only exist a single time in an Orchestrator environment.

Getting ready

To understand the Orchestrator role, see the recipe, Understanding Orchestrator architecture, in this book.

If you would like to make your SCO environment highly available, prepare your server like you did it for the first Instance.

How to do it...

There are different ways for each feature to make them highly available. Runbooks Server, web service, the Orchestration console, and Runbook Designer can be installed multiple time in your environment. The Management Server feature is not that easy to make highly available. See next how to make each feature highly available.

Runbooks can be configured to run on a single Runbook Server or fallback to a different one, see recipe, Making your Runbook highly available, Chapter 4, Building Advanced Runbooks.

The Runbook Designer can be installed multiple times on a Server or client OS, as they are completely standalone and are used to connect to a Management Server.

The Orchestration console and web service can also be installed multiple times; you only need to take care about the web service URLs and make them highly available with DNS and SPN.

To make the Management Server highly available, you need to take care about the OS and the DB itself.

Here is a list about your options in this:

  • Make the OS highly available, for example, as a VM on a cluster
  • Take care of the SQL database also as a VM on a cluster

At the time this book has been written, it is not supported to run a System Center Orchestrator database on a SQL Always ON instance.

How it works...

As you see, the Management Server is not that easy to be highly available, and it is a very important information. It's related to the SCO architecture, that all the information is stored in the database, so the DB is very important to to your complete SCO environment.

See also

Check out the How to do it… section of the Planning the Orchestrator deployment recipe.