free eBook: Microsoft System Center – Designing Orchestrator Runbooks

Hi, I’m Andreas Rynes, Lead Architect on the Datacenter Program Team, Microsoft Services HQ working on datacenter solutions focusing on automation and management.

0257_682986_PNG-550x0Today I’d like to introduce you to a free eBook that we recently released to the public and share with you a few thoughts about the concepts and patterns, as well as the rationale behind writing this book. We believe that orchestration and automation are becoming increasingly important to IT organizations of all sizes and across all infrastructure types ranging from on premise, public cloud, and hybrid cloud scenarios.

My team and I have personally had many discussions with customers that have installed Orchestrator, started building out Runbooks, and started their automation solution without spending a lot of time on the design and architecture of their System Center Orchestrator environment. Very often they find themselves in situations where they are locked in with their production Runbooks, need to implement changes or extend them, but realize that this would mean a complete rewrite of all of their Runbooks to implement the improvements or updates.

The objective of this book is to avoid those situations for our customers. It provides a framework for designing Runbooks and IT process automation to help the IT Pro get the most out of their System Center 2012 Orchestrator implementation and help them to utilize Orchestrator in a very modular approach, focusing on small, focused pieces of automation. These modules then being used to build into larger and more complex end-to-end process automation scenarios. Leveraging this guide provide the framework you need to build a scalable and extensible library of automation pieces that you can extend easily in the future.

By introducing different types of Runbooks, such as Component Runbooks and Control Runbooks, we also cover the specific challenges that many of you might have already come across using Orchestrator. We cover concepts such as how to deal with remote PowerShell scripts (providing a workaround for a current limitation of Orchestrator dealing with 64-bit modules) and how to deal with file-based variables or validations. We’ll don’t just cover theories or concepts, we also share some scripts and templates that you can use in your own environments and labs to get you started on building out your own IT process automation Runbooks.

To get access to this great content, please download the free eBook “Microsoft System Center – Designing Orchestrator Runbooks”, co-authored by David Ziembicki, Aaron Cushner and Andreas Rynes.

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2013/09/18/free-ebook-system-center-designing-orchestrator-runbooks.aspx

Enjoy reading it!

 

Andreas Rynes

Lead Architect

Datacenter Program Team

Microsoft Corporation