Get a sneak peak preview of System Center Orchestrator and see what Opalis can do in your environment today.

By combining the power of the system center suite, we will demonstrate an entire workflow automated through Opalis. This will provide the attendees a view of the Opalis solution and how to implement runbook solutions with or without other System Center Products.

Watch the video : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/introduction-to-opalis-and-a-sneak-peek-at-system-center-orchestrator

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 Resources :
Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 beta is available as public beta at the Microsoft Download Center : http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26503

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 Team Blog : http://blogs.technet.com/b/scorch/

TechNet Forums for System Center Cross Platform and Interoperability :http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/scinterop

Cheers
Christopher KEYAERT
http://twitter.com/keyaertc

SCOrchestrator

The Audit Trail is a collection of text file logs that contain information about the interaction of a Runbook with external tools and systems. This provides a quick method to identify what and who made changes for audit purposes.

How to activate/deactivate the Audit Trail:

• Open a command prompt with the Run as administrator privilege.
  
• and go to C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft System CenterOrchestrator 2012Opalis Integration ServerManagement Service
   
  
• To activate the Audit Trail: atlc /enable
  
• To deactivate the Audit Trail: atlc /disable
   

Where are the audit files ?

In the folder : C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft System CenterOrchestrator 2012Opalis Integration ServerManagement ServiceAudit

The file contains information about the date and time at which the policy was launched, the user name and domain that launched the policy, the name of the computer where the policy ran, and the name of the policy that was launched.

In the folder : C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft System CenterOrchestrator 2012Opalis Integration ServerAction ServerAudit

The file contains information about the date and time at which the activity ran, the name of the action server it ran on, the ID of the Policy Module that ran it, and the Object XML.

For having a better view, I advise your to copy/paste the output into a XML indenter tool (Example : http://xmlindent.com/).

Depending on how many policies you run and how many objects those policies contain, the Audit Trail may consume a large amount of disk space on the computer that runs the management server and action server. (When a file reaches 200 megabytes in size, a new file is created) Two solutions, active it only when needed and cleaned the files after, or create a little Runbook for archiving these files to another location.

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 Resources :
Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 beta is available as public beta at the Microsoft Download Center : http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26503

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 Team Blog : http://blogs.technet.com/b/scorch/

TechNet Forums for System Center Cross Platform and Interoperability :http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/scinterop

TechNet Library – Audit Trail : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg464925.aspx

Cheers
Christopher KEYAERT
http://twitter.com/keyaertc

SCOrchestrator

This session will provide you with an overview of the capabilities in OpsMgr 2012. With Operations Manager 2012 public beta, this session will get you started by explaining the new OpsMgr 2012 configuration – without an RMS!! We’ll also look at configuring high availability and pooling of management servers, as well as other new concepts to be sure that you are ready to get the most out of the upcoming beta.

Watch the Video : Operations Manager 2012: Overview, Setup and Configuration

Resources :
System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta : Installation step by step
System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta : Available for download

Cheers
Christopher KEYAERT
http://twitter.com/keyaertc

operations manager · opsmgr · Scom

Hi All,

As you probably notice, in the default activities available with Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 Beta, there is no Copy Folder activity.

Someone asked why during one of the Community Evaluation Program meetings and the answer was quite simple : “RoboCopy could easily take care of this task”. Here we go, I will show you how to simply use Robocopy in a System Center Orchestrator 2012 Runbook.

Today scenario will be a content copy of the folder C:SCOFolderSource (including files / sub-folders)

into another folder C:SCOFolderDestination.

For that we will use the command Robocopy and two default Orchestrator activities, the Initialize Data and the Run Program.

Once done, we will create two new variables, one for our Source folder and the other for our Destination Folder.

Back to our Runbook, we could go directly in the properties of the Run Command activity.

• Mode : we choose Command execution.
• Details > Computer : I chose to run the command by the Orchestrator server, so right click in the Computer Field, choose Returned Data, check the box Show common Returned Data and select Runbook Server Name.
  
• Details > Command : Robocopy is built-in in Windows 2008, so we could call it directly. If you are running Windows Server 2003, you will have to download it and to specify the path in the command field.

After calling robocopy, we specify the two variables (FolderSource and FolderDestination) that we defined earlier, and finally we specify the parameters : /E /COPYALL /TS /FP

All the details about the parameters could be found here : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733145(WS.10).aspx

Our Copy Folder Runbook is now ready to run. Just press on the Run button and check the log history :

A little look in our destination folder, we could see that all the content has been well copied.

Of course this is a really simple activity, now you could re-use it in any of your existing Runbooks.

This Runbook is available here : DOWNLOAD

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 Resources :
Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 beta is available as public beta at the Microsoft Download Center : http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26503

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 Team Blog : http://blogs.technet.com/b/scorch/

TechNet Forums for System Center Cross Platform and Interoperability :http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/scinterop

Cheers
Christopher KEYAERT
http://twitter.com/keyaertc

SCOrchestrator

As you are already aware, System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta is now available for public download. The download link is available in my previous post : System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta : Available for download

Once the file downloaded, you have to uncompressed it and let takes a look to the SCOM2012 installer.

Here the first screen of the new System Center Operations Manager 2012 installer.

So let’s go, click on install and we have now the license agreement.

In the following screen, you could choose which components you want to install. In my lab, I’m using a separate SQL Server which is also hosting the SQL Reporting service role. So I will uncheck the box for the Reporting Server component for the moment and we will install it later in this post, directly on the SQL server.

If you keep the box checked without having the Sql Reporting service installed on your current computer, you will be block later in the setup process.

So, we continue the setup process without the Reporting Server component. Here we just have to choose the Installation folder.

The new prerequisites checker is now in progress.

And the result. In my lab, two blocking prerequisites.

First one, I have to install the Report Viewer Controls. This is available as free download at the following url : http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=3841

The second one is the IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility role missing.

Go the Server Manager, add role and now check the IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility.

We recheck the prerequisites, and we just still have two warnings. As I’m using Virtual Machines in a lab environment, we could ignore it and continue the setup process.

Totally new environment, so we create a new management group.

We are now at the SQL part of the setup, I specified my SQL 2008 R2 server name and the setup directly detects that the SQL Server Full-Text-Search is not installed on it.

Go to the SQL Server and run the SQL installer.

In the setup, we just have to add a component to an existing instance and we check the Full-Text-Search component.

Go back to our SCOM2012 installation, the setup is now ok with the configuration of the Operational database and to let us continue.

Now, the parameters for the Warehouse database.

For the web console, we choose the Default Web Site :

Choose your authentication mode for the web console. As it’s for internal use only, the Mixed Authentication is the one that we have to choose.

The credentials part is one of the most interesting and important of the setup. I decided to use one dedicated account as Server Action Account. This account will be use for agent deployment, tasks, …. and a second account for reading and writing into the databases.

We have to create two news users domain.

Adding them as local admin of our future SCOM2012 management server and also as local Admin of the SQL Server.

Now, there is a part on which I’m not really sure. For installing the DB, is the setup will use my current credentials ? Or is the setup will use the service account that we provided. (I will update the post when I ‘ll receive the answer )

In doubt, we go to the SQL server credentials and we add the SCOM2012_DB account as SysAdmin. Like this, the setup process will be able to create the DBs and assign it the rights.

Go back to the SCOM Installation, We just have to provide the credentials of the two accounts that we created.

My lab VMs don’t have internet access, so I’m not able to participate to the Customer Experience Improvement Program, but if you could, please do it.

SCOM2012 seems to be part now of the Microsoft Update program. Option that I will test when I will have a lab with internet access.

The installation Summary where we could review all the information we provided.

Installation in progress……

Woua, setup completed

I opened the new SCOM2012 console… and first surprise…. I’ve got already some alerts

So, It’s seems that the Action Account that we provided during needs to have Read/Write to the WareHouse Db ? What for ? As we already provided a separate service account for the DBs access. Personally, I think that this is a little bug of this first beta release, I will retrieve it to the Microsoft Connect Site.

Ok, but how to solve this ? Simply go to the SQL server, in the credentials part. We open the properties of the Action Account (SCOM2012_AA) and in the User Mapping part, we set the same rights than the SCOM2012_DB account has on the OperationsManagerDW database.

As we already are in the SQL Studio, we could also remove the SysAdmin right that we granted to the SCOM2012_DB account during the setup process. This is not needed anymore.

Once done, all the alerts disappeared

Ok, so now, what’s about the reporting ? Go to the SQL server where we have the Sql Reporting Services installed and Run the SCOM2012 Setup, click on Install.

Select only the Reporting Server component.

Installation folder location.

Prerequisites checker.

We have to specify one management server of our SCOM2012 infrastructure.

We are now able to select the SQL Server instance for reporting services.

Red Cross, this is not good

Hopefully, Microsoft did a great work on the SCOM2012 installer, and simply by clicking on the Red Cross, we have the reason of the failure.

We simply have to start the SQL Server Agent service and to set it to Automatically.

We specify the DB reader account that we already used before.

If you server has internet access, please choose Yes.

As I said before, my lab servers don’t have internet access, so I will handle the updates manually.

The installation Summary report.

Go for the installation.

Once done, we’re now able to generate reports in your all new SCOM 2012 infrastructure.

Stay tune for next posts about SCOM2012

Cheers
Christopher KEYAERT
http://twitter.com/keyaertc

operations manager · opsmgr · Scom