The IIS community newsletter for July 2012 has been published. It’s been a few months (6 or 7) since the last edition was published. Thanks to an old friend, he is helping with the newsletter.
http://www.iisnewsletter.com/archive/july2012.html
Enjoy!
Steve Schofield
Microsoft MVP – IIS
http://www.iislogs.com/steveschofield
I created a Runbook sample today that would run every 5 minutes, execute program (IISLogsEXE 4.0) and write status to the event log. This three step Runbook won’t break any records in complexity, but is functional. I have many tasks that are “low hanging fruit”. These simple Runbooks will save time and administration. It’s been fun over the last couple of years to deep dive into learning System Center Configuration Manager (previously worked with SMS 2003). Orchestrator is another one of those tools that MS has in their enterprise tool chest. As much as MS stumbles in the consumer market with one seemly fumble after another, in the enterprise space enhancing tools like Orchestrator is awesome.
My brief blog is to get me back sharing information on what I learned this go around. In my testing the “Tester” was useful in proving my Runbook worked. It amazes me today there is a lot of information available when picking up a technology. This speeds the process of learning the basics in a technology. Compared to IIS, ASP.NET communities I’ve been in for the last 10+ years, something like Orchestrator has humble beginnings with a rising community with a lot of help and more importantly, examples! Here is what I found and wanted to pass along to those newbies picking up Orchestrator.
Run by Ryan Andorfer (he is guru with Orchestrator, definitely read anything by Ryan and a he is a good guy too, met him at MMS 2012)
http://scorch.codeplex.com/
Developer resource to retrieve data from C# or Powershell
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh921685.aspx
General reference to various Activities with SCOrch
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh403800
Another good resource by Charles Joy (these have good examples I refer to for howto’s)
http://orchestrator.codeplex.com/releases/view/86195
My motto for now is thing simple and functional. Solve everyday problems and the more complex will quickly happen using SCOrch.
Steve Schofield
Microsoft MVP – IIS
I’ve been lucky enough to start messing around with System Center 2012 Orchestrator (previously known as Opalis). One of my roles these days in IT is automation, automation, automation. Orchestrator main role is to automate those tasks identified as ‘routine’. It literally took me all of 10 minutes to download from Technet, install on my DEV system and get going. Microsoft couldn’t have made it any easier, or should I say the people from Opalis and MS tweaked for 2012.
This is a short blog, I have a few low hanging fruit tasks I’m targeting first. Here are a few links I wanted to pass along in my journey. Hopefully as I’ve done with other technologies, pass any tips along!
Orchestrator IP (integration packs) on Codeplex (The examples are really cool)
http://orchestrator.codeplex.com
Discussion forums
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenterorchestrator
I’m real new to the System Center community. I attending MMS 2012 and went to everything Orchestrator
Few of the people to keep an eye our for is
PS – My favorite name is SCOrch. If you perform it manual, SCOrch it!
Happy Scorching!
Steve Schofield