Offering a runbook that automatically patches and reboots all virtual machines for
a particular user or business group
Automatically scaling up and down deployed services by triggering runbooks that
perform scaling based on performance alerts from Operations Manager
Deprovisioning virtual machines or services that have passed a given length of
time or date for development purposesRemember that the point of the private cloud is its automation, and you can’t
automate by using graphic consoles. Therefore, as you learn System Center and
Virtual Machine Manager in particular, look at the series of actions you perform, look
at PowerShell, look at the activities in integration packs, and start creating runbooks
in Orchestrator that can be used. Once the runbooks are created, they can be manually
triggered by using the Silverlight web-based Orchestrator interface or triggered from
other systems such as an item in Service Manager’s service catalog. With Orchestrator
being able to connect to almost any system, with a little bit of work, any manual
process you perform should be able to be automated—and more important,
orchestrated—with System Center Orchestrator.
I’ve talked about System Center Service Manager repeatedly in this chapter. Service
Manager is the configuration management database (CMDB) of your organization. It
has feeds and connections to all of the other System Center components. Service
Manager offers various services, including basic ticketing activities, such as incidents
(things not doing what they should), problems (something is broken), and change
requests (I want something). When problems occur in the environment, you can look
at a computer in Service Manager; because it connects to all the systems, information
from all of those systems is visible, so you have a single point of truth about the asset
as well as solutions. In Service Manager, you can see all of the hardware, software, and
patch status gathered from Configuration Manager. You can see AD information that
was pulled from AD. You can see any alerts that were generated by Operations
Manager plus any more complex service dependencies, such as all the systems that are
responsible, from providing messaging services to the organization.
Because of all these connections to systems, Service Manager can provide a great
service for your private cloud. So far I’ve talked about creating clouds, virtual
machines, and services with the SCVMM console, App Controller, PowerShell, and
Orchestrator. There are problems, though, when you think of end users for all these
approaches. Users typically don’t want a separate interface just for requesting a virtual
machine. Users are not going to run PowerShell scripts you give them, and giving
them a list of runbooks they can run through a web interface is likely to baffle them.
So Service Manager 2012 introduced a new feature called a service catalog. The service
catalog is a single source that can contain all of the types of services offered by the
organization. This could include creating a new user, requesting the installation of a
software package through SCCM, asking for a new keyboard, or anything that Service
Manager has the ability to enable through its connections to other systems. The