David Ziembicki - Microsoft System Center: Designing Orchestrator Runbooks

Welcome to Microsoft System Center: Designing Orchestrator Runbooks . We believe that orchestration and automation are becoming increasingly important in IT organizations of all sizes and across all infrastructure types ranging from on-premises to cloud-based. Orchestration and automation can help reduce the cost of IT while improving consistency and quality of IT service delivery. Like any powerful technology. however, it can be both used and abused.

Our objective with this book is to provide a framework for runbook design and IT process automation to help you get the most out of System Center Orchestrator 2012 and to help you utilize Orchestrator in concert with the rest of the System Center for an enterprise-wide and systematic approach to process automation. We will provide detailed guidance for creating what we call modular automation where small, focused pieces of automation are progressively built into larger and more complex solutions. We detail the concept of an automation library, where over time enterprises build a progressively larger library of interoperable runbooks and components. Finally, we will cover advanced scenarios and design patterns for topics like error handling and logging, state management, and parallelism. But before we dive into the details, well begin by setting the stage with a quick overview of System Center 2012 Orchestrator and deployment scenarios.

About the companion content

The companion content for this book consists of Windows PowerShell scripts and other code samples. It can be downloaded from the following page:

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Chapter 1. Introducing System Center 2012

Microsoft System Center 2012 is Microsofts solution for cloud and datacenter management as well client device management and security. From its origins nearly 20 years ago as primarily a desktop management solution, System Center has evolved into a leading enterprise management solution across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure including devices, applications, and services.

System Center 2012 is comprised of a suite of components, each focused on part of the infrastructure management lifecycle such as provisioning, monitoring, backup, and disaster recovery. From an IT process automation perspective, the System Center components are the arms and legs of the automation capability, which act on end systems while System Center Orchestrator, and the runbooks created within it, are the brains of the automation, controlling the order and flow of activities and responding to events during the automated process.

In , each of the focus areas of System Center are listed as well as the System Center components that deliver those capabilities.

Figure 1-1. The System Center 2012 suite.

We will briefly introduce all of the System Center components in this chapter from the perspective of their use and value in IT process automation. For detailed information on each component, please refer to Microsoft TechNet.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is Microsofts solution for heterogeneous datacenter virtualization and management. VMM assists in establishing the datacenter foundation from bare-metal deployment of Hyper-V host servers to creating Hyper-V clusters to updating Hyper-V infrastructures. VMM can integrate with and manage a variety of storage and network infrastructure components. For heterogeneous environments, VMM can manage both VMware and Citrix XenServer environments in addition to Hyper-V. With the virtualization infrastructure established, VMM enables the deployment and management of both virtual machines and service templates, which are multiple virtual machine configurations enabling the deployment of complex or multitier applications.

Using all of the above capabilities, VMM is a key component in establishing private cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). From an IT process automation perspective, VMM, with its ability to manage compute, network, storage, and virtual resources, backed by hundreds of Windows PowerShell cmdlets, will be one of the most important System Center components utilized by many automated processes.

System Center Operations Manager

System Center Operations Manager is the monitoring and alerting component of System Center across physical, virtual, and applications/services. In recent versions, Operations Manager has expanded to support monitoring Linux systems as well as network and storage resources. Operations Manager continues to be extended by a wide range of partners through management packs. From an IT process automation perspective, Operations Manager is frequently the sources of alerts and events which are the triggers for process automation or Orchestrator runbooks. Examples include a performance alert triggering a runbook to scale out a web farm, or a hardware fault triggering a runbook to place a Hyper-V host into maintenance mode.