Microsoft Systems Center Orchestrator 2012 – Features and Architecture

Features

System center orchestrator provides the capability to:

• Automate Processes and IT operations regardless of hardware or platform
• Improve Operational Service Level Agreements by providing zero drop time in manual operations
• Connect systems from different vendors

Understanding SCO Architecture

The basic concept of SCO is that it allows you to create an automated sequence of tasks using built-in GUI based activities. Some instances of activities are 'monitor Even Log', 'Validate an SQL Command', or 'Send Email' etc.

These activities can be linked to each other to create a workflow. These activities are available in the form of Integration Packs for various technologies and vendors.

These automated sequences are referred as runbooks that are created in the runbook designer. The runbooks execute from the runbooks server.

All information related to the deployed runbooks, the status of running runbooks, log files, and configuration data for Orchestrator is stored in the Microsoft SQL database.

The runbook server communicates with the database server through the management server.
Once a runbook is created, it is important to debug it. Therefore, the runbook designer provides a runbook tester to test the rubooks created.

The database orchestrator is a web based console that allows to start or stop runbooks and view real-time status on a web browser.

The deployment manager is a tool to deploy the integration packs from various vendors.

Orchestrator web services enable the custom applications to connect to the Orchestrator console to start or stop runbooks.