System Center Orchestrator 2012 Overview

Editor's Notes

• #4: A common question asked is why Microsoft is investing in process automation in the System Center suite. The answer is quite simple … because it is a critical component that is required to gain full benefit from the System Center suite.The name Process Automation is a bit misleading, because Automation is the last thing you do. Before you can automate across the datacenter, you need to have Integration and the ability to Orchestrate across systems. We are investing heavily in these tools because they are a critical component of a management suite and required to bring all the components of the datacenter together and build towards the services you will deliver in a Private Cloud.The adoption of Opalis and looking ahead to Orchestrator brings you 3 immediate benefits – Consistency in your operations, Compliance against your regulatory requirements and the Cohesion of your datacenter components.And whether you are looking to start out with the removal of manual tasks, or move to dynamic fully automated services, we give you the choice on where you fit on that scale and how quickly you move from where you are to where you want to be.
• #5: So lets start with where we are today. Opalis 6.3 is the solution we have in market right now, and you can get started right now!(speaker note: Opalis is a subsidiary of Microsoft. It is NOT “Microsoft Opalis” or “System Center Opalis”. It can only legally be referred to as “Opalis”. And if you want to be completely accurate, the company name is Opalis and the product is Opalis Integration Server ).
• #7: You can break down the core capabilities required to manage a Datacenter into 5 key areas. And in all likelihood, you will have a range of solutions in your datacenter from a variety of vendors.The System Center suite provides solutions to all of these areas, and with the addition of Opalis to the suite we also provide the mechanism to integrate to the 3rd party solutions. This is an investment that we are committed to and will continue to maintain as part of Orchestrator. There are 3 words we associate with Opalis/Orchestrator. The first is Integration.Bringing all of the components of your datacenter together and being able to communicate and execute across all the different moving parts is the first step. This brings us to Orchestration.Once you have integrated your datacenter and can reference it is a single entity, then you can start to map out how to co-ordinate all the different parts to work together.And then you can automate all of this to deliver consistent and repeatable results.
• #9: The Opalis Databus is one of the most important capabilities and benefits that Opalis delivers. The Databus is a subscribe and publish mechanism that allows you to interact with all the information that is created or consumed as a runbook executes.What you see as this animation proceeds is a representation of what happens on the Databus. As the runbook executes, the data associated with the activity is put onto the bus, and is available to subsequent activities. Each activity can interact with information from all previous activities.
• #10: As you all will be aware, there are many different silos within an IT environment. The diagram we have here is representative of what a lot of customers have in their technology organizations. With Opalis, we are able to integrate and automate across these silos.If we take an example of VM lifecycle, you can see an example of a runbook and how it cuts across these silos to provide the complete process required to deploy out a new virtual machine.
• #11: Everyone has a place to start! There are a number of example targets as you can see. This list is not exhaustive, merely suggestive.There is a story that will help you understand how to get going.We have a customer, and they have a task where every morning they move a pile of rocks from A to B. So the person who does this comes in, and every morning moves the rocks from one place to another.So we create a runbook that moves rocks. Now, every morning that person comes in, and instead of moving the rocks, its done for them and they can do something else.But there is a second step after that. Once the rocks are moved, they are then sorted by size, small, medium and large.So we update the runbook. Now the rocks are moved from one place to another, and then sorted by size, so now we have 3 piles of rocks.This is great! Now the person comes in, and can do something even more interesting.But then we discover there is a 3rd step, and once the rocks are sorted by size, they are sorted again by color.No problem, we update the runbook again, and now we move the rocks, sort them by size and then by color, red green and blue.Now this example is typical of what happens, and is import for 2 reasons.Firstly, its important to start with something small and get to understand how to build runbooks.But more importantly, secondly the planning takes longer than the building. If you understand your process up front and what it looks like in completeness, you can build the entire runbook from the start!
• #12: Opalis is an incredibly powerful solution. It’s been market tested, its several generations old and we have a lot of customers using it today.There are 2 keys to the success of Opalis. Firstly there is the authoring and debugging capabilities. It is very easy to learn how to build runbooks with graphical drag and drop interfaces, and a very powerful debugging console that lets you see exactly what is going on when the runbook executes.Secondly there is the Databus which you saw earlier.We have a wide range of OOB integration packs, and provide the Quick Integration kit to build your own as well!And of course we make it very cost effective by including it in all the major licensing constructs.
• #13: Opalis is currently a subsidiary of Microsoft, so just a note that you get the Opalis product a little differently than normal.
• #15: There are 4 key investment areas for Orchestrator.For the IT Pro, we are continuing the rich authoring experience from Opalis 6.3 which will remain very similar to how it is today.Then we head into new capabilties. For the Operator we have a new Silverlight console that provides the ability to start, monitor progress and troubleshoot runbooks.For the developer, we have a new PowerShell Provider to interact with Orchestrator through the command line, and also a new rich ODATA REST based web service.And for the ITBM, that same web service is used to get statistical information about the Orchestration environment and build reports in BI tool like PowerPivot and SQL.
• #16: These are the components of an Opalis implementation.