Part of a series of specialized guides on System Center - this book delivers a focused drilldown into designing runbooks for Orchestrator workflow management solutions. Series editor Mitch Tulloch and a team of System Center experts provide concise technical guidance as they step you through key design concepts, criteria, and tasks.

Using System Center 2012 Orchestrator, you can capture and document processes across your entire IT organization, establishing the automation you need to deliver advanced cloud services and self-adjusting computing resources. Authored by five leading System Center experts, this comprehensive reference and technical guide brings together all the knowledge you'll need to architect, install, implement, integrate, and maximize the value of your own Orchestrator solutions. The authors introduce current best practices based on large-scale enterprise implementations they've personally led or participated in. This up-to-date guide shows how to apply Orchestrator's major improvements to implement IT process automation in any environment, including private clouds. You'll start with context: what Orchestrator does, how it has evolved, how it works, and essential architecture and design techniques. Next, the authors help you make crucial up-front decisions about activities, runbooks, security, and administration. Finally, you'll find expert guidance for integrating Orchestrator with the rest of System Center and with Windows Azure cloud services--including advanced automated workflows that encompass both data center and cloud. Detailed information on how to... * Understand System Center 2012 Orchestrator's capabilities, evolution, architecture, and design, including SP1 improvements and R2 * Successfully install System Center 2012 Orchestrator and migrate smoothly from Opalis Integration Server 6.3 * Take full advantage of Orchestrator's advanced new runbook automation capabilities * Configure activities associated with runbook control, systems, scheduling, monitoring, files, email, notification, and data handling * Design runbooks for fault tolerance and optimal performance * Enforce strong security using roles, permissions, and auditing * Deliver integration capabilities for Operations Manager, Service Manager, Configuration Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, and Data Protection Manager * Automate end-to-end data center/ cloud workflows with integration packs and PowerShell * Create your own integration packs with Orchestrator Integration Toolkit (OIT.SDK) * Support Orchestrator 2012, troubleshoot problems, and discover the best web and third-party resources

Design, implement, and improve your infrastructure administration with System Center Orchestrator 2012 R2's automation process About This Book Learn about the components of Orchestrator, the design and implementation process, and the way it interacts with your environment to create outstanding automation processes Gain an in-depth understanding of Runbooks, while exploring its security and troubleshooting aspects Follow this step-by-step guide at your own pace and get yourself in the frontline of the Orchestrator world Who This Book Is For This book is targeted for those who want to gain time in their administrative tasks and profit from it to improve also their environment by reaching a more autonomous infrastructure. Experience with other System Center family products as well as Active Directory and other core datacentre components would be useful to help you understand and execute the information given in this book. What You Will Learn Plan, assess, design, and implement Orchestrator 2012 R2 in a corporate environment Master the Runbook Designer and discover all about the Runbook creation process Import and integrate more technologies through new imported functionalities and learn what they bring to your environment Extend your possibilities and interaction with your environment while you get a hand of the best practices for this system Implement high-availability, security, backup, and recovery procedures and fine-tuning of the platform Familiarize yourself with the Runbook design and its implementation with an insight into the methodology for a more dynamic Datacenter In Detail 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. Style and approach Written in a step-by-step guide format, the chapters are organized in a sequence of what you need to know first to move on to the next component. Each chapter contains a broad explanation of what we are working on at that moment and the tips provided are based on real-world experience.

Part of a series of specialized guides on System Center - this book shares real-world expertise for using Configuration Manager capabilities to deliver more effective IT services. Series editor Mitch Tulloch and a team of System Center experts provide concise technical guidance as they step you through key deployment and management scenarios.

This is the definitive real-world guide to Microsoft System Center 2012, Microsoft's newest and most powerful version of System Center. Authored by consultants who've deployed System Center in hundreds of enterprises and innovative smaller businesses, this book brings together up-to-the-minute tips, tricks, and techniques you just won't find anywhere else. You'll learn how to use System Center's powerful capabilities to build highly-efficient managed environments that encompass datacenters, cloud environments, client computers, mobile devices, and more. The authors address planning, design, implementation, integration, and administration, and cover every component, including Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, Data Protection Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Service Manager, and Orchestrator. Use Configuration Manager 2012 to deliver software and updates in highly-distributed environments including datacenters, clouds, and mobile devices Reliably manage and report on assets with Configuration Manager 2012 Perform monitoring, alerting, operations, and security reporting with Operations Manager 2012 Use Data Protection Manager 2012to protect file systems, SQL, Microsoft Exchange, and SharePoint Leverage Data Protection Manager 2012's improved central monitoring and remote recovery Run Hyper-V virtualized environments with VMM 2012--including new private clouds and mixed private/public fabrics Use Service Manager 2012 to provide top-down integration, and use Orchestrator 2012 for bottom-up process automation and integration "glue" Give users an efficient self-service portal for creating service and incident requests and browsing service catalogs Manage service offerings and implement enterprise-wide change control with Service Manager 2012 Ensure compliance by creating, executing, and repeating auditable, documented processes with Orchestrator 2012

Part of a series of specialized guides on System Center - this book provides focused guidance for deploying and customizing Service Manager, an integrated platform for automating and adapting an organization’s IT service management best practices. Led by series editor Mitch Tulloch, a team of System Center experts step you through key technical scenarios and tasks.

Over 30 recipes to automate your mission-critical tasks using the new and powerful Microsoft System Center 2016 Orchestrator About This Book Create powerful runbooks for the entire System Center 2016 product line Explore System Center 2016 Orchestrator to manage and automate your datacenter A recipe-based guide to using SCO efficiently Who This Book Is For If you are a system administrator and want to simplify the process of automating system administration tasks using System Center Orchestrator 2016 then this book is for you. A basic knowledge of SCO is expected What You Will Learn Create Runbooks for IT Service Management processes Design and create Runbooks for System Center Confguration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager Set up System Center Orchestrator, making it highly available Create branching, looping, and child Runbooks to completely master System Center 2016 Orchestrator Implement a security model for your System Center Orchestrator deployment and to execute Runbooks Manage and automate your Datacenter with powerful Runbooks Automate your System Center environment In Detail 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. Style and approach This book is written in a practical, cookbook style with numerous chapters and recipes focusing on creating runbooks to automate mission-critical and everyday administration tasks.