Introduction
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, we’ll begin by setting the stage with a quick overview of
System Center 2012 Orchestrator and deployment scenarios.
Microsoft System Center 2012 is Microsoft’s 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.
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