Florian Aguettaz IT Blog: [System Center] Full review of all System Center product ( #SystemCenter )

Florian Aguettaz is posting a full review of all System Center products. There are currently 7 products in the System Center Suite that are used to cover all the ITIL best practices. Each one will be detailed in different post on his blog.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties.

[Orchestrator] Integrating Cluster Aware Updating with Operations Manager Maintenance Mode – Pre and Post Update Scripts ( #SCOM #Orchestrator )

Neil Peterson has published on June the 17th 2013 a step-by-step post to demonstrating how to use the Cluster Aware Updating Pre and Post-Update Script execution feature to place each node of the target cluster into Operations Manager maintenance mode before the cluster aware updating process is executed. This exercise can be extended to any pre or post activates that you would like to perform on you cluster nodes at maintenance time.

Direct link to Neil's Article

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[Orchestrator 2012] Patching Orchestrator Runbook Servers while Maintaining High-Availability

Balancing server patching with maintaining the availability of the services that run on these servers can be a difficult task for an IT Pro, with lots of repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone steps. Luckily, Orchestrator has emerged as an effective automation tool to help IT Pros manage the patching process. But what about when the Orchestrator service itself needs to be patched? How can an IT Pro ensure their enterprise automation continues to function despite the patching of the servers running Orchestrator components?

Joe Levy has published an interesting post to expose all steps to follow to be able to maintain high availability when patching Runbook Servers.

Read the original post here

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties.

[MMS 2013] Microsoft Management Submit 2013 - Session catalog is available

Session catalog is now live ! Check it on http://www.2013mms.com/Topic/List



I've search for Operations Manager :

• AM-B301 DevOps and Operations Manager: New Management Packs
• AM-B303 DevOps: Global Service Monitoring with System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1
• AM-IL203 Transform the Datacenter Immersion Part 3 of 4: Application Management
• IM-B313 Workloads: Managing Windows, IIS & SQL technologies with Operations Manager 2012 SP1 and SC Advisor
• IM-IL204 Transform the Datacenter Immersion Part 4 of 4: Insight and Availability
• WS-B307 DevOps: Azure Monitoring & Authoring Updates for Operations Manager 2012 SP1

Then for Orchestrator

• SD-B202 What's New with Orchestrator Integration Packs for System Center and SP1
• SD-B204 Best Practices For Runbrook Authoring and Managin Orchestrator
• SD-B301 Real–World Implementation of Automating Service Request Catalogs with Service Manager
• SD-B304 Complex Maintenance Using System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and Orchestrator: Patching a Cluster
• SD-B305 Configuration Manager 2012 and Orchestrator 2012
• SD-B310 Best in Breed Together: Real World Scenarios with Service Manager and Orchestrator
• UD-B319 How Microsoft IT Upgrades System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Hierarchy with System Center Orchestrator Automation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties.

[Orchestrator 2012] Orchestrator (SCORCH) 2012 Reference Guides

Eswar Koneti has posted on his blog today an interesting page related to Orchestrator 2012. He has listed out all the SCORCH guides integrated with Configuration manager 2012 to make us able to start building our SCORCH environment to integrate with System center products(Configmgr 2012).

Direct link to Eswar Koneti's blog

A quick summary of the different link posted :

Start with the TechNet Documentation and the SCORCH Standard Activities.

System Center Orchestrator 2012: An Overview Video
Orchestrator 2012: a quick start deployment guide from Kelvin Holman

List of Step by Step series guides on Over View ,installation,runbook etc.

• Orchestrator 2012 Deployment & Configuration Step by Step – Part 1 “Overview and Architecture”
• Orchestrator 2012 Deployment & Configuration Step by Step – Part 2 “System Requirements”
• Orchestrator 2012 Deployment & Configuration Step by Step – Part 3 “Installation”
• Orchestrator 2012 Deployment & Configuration Step by Step – Part 4 “Build, Testing and Monitoring a Runbook
• Orchestrator 2012 Deployment & Configuration Step by Step – Part 5 “Integration Pack
• More Videos from YouTube are here
• Orchestrator Engineering Blog
• Integration Packs for System Center 2012 – Orchestrator 
• Active Directory Integration Pack for System Center 2012 - Orchestrator
• Exchange Admin Integration Pack for Orchestrator in System Center 2012 SP1
• Exchange Users Integration Pack for Orchestrator in System Center 2012 SP1
• FTP Integration Pack for Orchestrator in System Center 2012 SP1
• HP iLO and OA Integration Pack for System Center 2012 - Orchestrator
• HP Operations Manager Integration Pack for System Center 2012 - Orchestrator
• HP Service Manager Integration Pack for System Center 2012 - Orchestrator
• IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus Integration Pack for System Center 2012 - Orchestrator
• Representational State Transfer (REST) Integration Pack Guide for Orchestrator in System Center 2012 SP1
• Windows Azure Integration Pack for Orchestrator in System Center 2012 SP1
• VMware vSphere Integration Pack for System Center 2012 - Orchestrator
• Integration Packs for System Center
• Orchestrator Integration Toolkit
• System Center 2012 – Orchestrator Component Add-ons and Extensions
• System Center Orchestrator 2012: Migration Plan
• System Center Orchestrator 2012: how to build your first run book
• How to create local Variables in Run Book

Integrated with System Center Configuration Manager (configmgr) 2012:

• System Center Orchestrator Console Extension for Configuration Manager using run book commander 2.0
• How to Automate Configuration manager Application Request Via Email Using Orchestrator
• Configmgr 2012 and Orchestrator – Using Status Message as a Run book Trigger Mechanism
• Updating a SQL Cluster using Configmgr 2012 and Orchestrator (System Center 2012 Updated)
• Tracking Automatic Software Removals using Orchestrator in Configmgr /SCCM 2012

From my part, I would add a link to technet on How to Create an Orchestrator Connector that can be usefull.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties.

[Orchestrator] Orchestrator does not reconnect when the SQL server is restarted

Runbooks stop executing and the Orchestrator Runbook Service and Management Server do not function as expected when the SQL Server instance that hosts the Orchestrator database is restarted. Errors are expected to occur during the downtime of the SQL Server, however proper connectivity and behavior does not restore once the SQL Server instance has restarted.

KB Article

When the problem is occurring, the following events are logged to Orchestrator's Event window:

The Orchestrator Runbook Service on <server name> is no longer running. Verify the status of the Runbook Server and try to restart Orchestrator Runbook Service. If the problem persists, contact Technical Support.

and

The Runbook Server is suspended because the product license expired.

Cause

The Orchestrator services must be restarted in order for normal behavior to be restored. Microsoft has determined this is an issue in System Center 2012 Orchestrator.

 

Resolution

A fix is scheduled to be available in an upcoming update for System Center. Please contact Microsoft Technical Support for more details. 

Note This is a "FAST PUBLISH" article created directly from within the Microsoft support organization. The information contained herein is provided as-is in response to emerging issues. As a result of the speed in making it available, the materials may include typographical errors and may be revised at any time without notice. See Terms of Use (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=151500) for other considerations.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties.

System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Beta - Evaluation (VHD) is published

This download consists of files that you extract into a single pre-configured VHD file for this System Center component. The VHD enables you to create a virtual machine to evaluate the different System Center components.

Quick details

Version:	SP1 Beta	Date published:	9/27/2012
Language:	English

• System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Beta – App Controller – Evaluation (VHD)
• System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Beta – Data Protection Manager – Evaluation (VHD)
• System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Beta – Operations Manager – Evaluation (VHD)
• System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Beta – Orchestrator – Evaluation (VHD)
• System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Beta – Service Manager – Evaluation (VHD)
• System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Beta – Virtual Machine Manager – Evaluation (VHD)

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties.

[Orchestrator 2012] Importing Integration Packs via PowerShell

Here is a link to a post from Robert_Hearn that explain the different possibilities given by COM. They also expose how to import Integration Packs by using a PowerShell Script.

Around the office, we have more and more internal teams that are latching on to Orchestrator and wanting to use it for building all sorts of integrations and automations, but one of the things that comes up from time to time is how to get the ability to have some sort of complete installation process that doesn’t require a separate step for installing Integration Packs or runbooks. In this case, enabling the automatic registering and deployment of an Integration Pack would really enable a streamlined installation process.

Note from the legal dept: The process described here is not officially supported by Microsoft and are provided only as an example to the community. Neither I nor Microsoft, nor any other person, animal, vegetable or mineral assumes responsibility for the process demonstrated here. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Here are links to the previous parts of the “COM” series:

• Getting Deeper Information from Orchestrator via COM
• Getting Deeper Information from orchestrator via COM, part 2
• Getting Deeper Information from Orchestrator via COM, part 3

And here is the direct link to the post 

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties.

[OpsMgr 2007R2][OpsMgr 2012] Building groups in Operations Manager, with a bit of Orchestrator magic

Anders Bengtsson  has posted on April 2012 the 11th an article to show how to use Orchestrator to update a management pack that contains groups. Each time you run the runbook, a new version of your MP is generated and groups members are also updated.



In many scenarios you have a list of servers, a database query result or a place in your Active Directory that contains servers that you want to monitor in some special way. Often you need the machines in a group in Operations Manager so you can for example create overrides, maintenance mode and views for that group. It is a pretty boring work to build the group manually and then to keep the group updated.

A way to get the Operations Manager group in sync with the machine list is to use a runbook that creates a management pack including a group based on the list. This set of example runbooks reads a list of machine, creates a management pack with a group that includes the machines. The list of servers could be generated by another runbook or another tool. The last runbook also imports the management pack into Operations Manager.

Read more on http://contoso.se/blog/?p=2963

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties.