System Center 2012 is Released

System Center 2012 has reached RTM and is available for MSDN subscribers, Microsoft Partners and other VL Customers

The following is available at the partner portal:

• System Center 2012 – App Controller
• System Center 2012 – ConfigMgr and Endpoint Protection
• System Center 2012 – Data Protection Mgr Server and Toolkit
• System Center 2012 – Operations Manager Server
• System Center 2012 – Orchestrator Server
• System Center 2012 – Unified Installer
• System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager Server
• System Center 2012 – Service Manager Server

An introduction to Orchestrator – Part 2 Schedules

In Part 1 we took a look at Computer Groups, this time we take a look at Schedules.

Schedules enable you to define when a Workflow or Activity can run. For example, there may be times when it is inappropriate to run some Workflows, such as running a backup Workflow on a main server during regular business hours.

1. Checking a Schedule

This Workflow uses the Check Schedule Activity to match the current date/time (the date and time of when the ‘Weekday?’ Activity is started) against a Schedule that is active on weekdays only:

An introduction to Orchestrator – Part 1 Computer Groups

System Center 2012 – Orchestrator is designed to interact with all of your data center systems. Computer groups let you target selected activities against a set of similar computer systems instead of a single computer. By configuring the activities in your runbook to use a computer group, you have the flexibility to add computers dynamically by adding them to the computer group.

You can also organize your computer groups into folders. Use the following steps to create a new folder.

To create a folder

1. In the Connections pane in the Runbook Designer, click the Computer Groups folder or a subfolder.
2. Right-click to select New, and then click Folder.
3. In this example the Folder is named Demo Group

Working with the “Get Computer/IP Status” activity in Orchestrator

While working with the “Get Computer/IP Status” activity in my System Center 2012 Orchestrator demo environment I ran into the following issue; “Raw socket error. Error: 10013 An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions.” resulting in a failed activity.

Looking up the Get Computer/IP Status activity in the Technet Library gave med the following information;

“You cannot set individual security credentials for this activity. It will run under the service account configured for the Runbook Service on the Runbook server where the instance of the activity is running. This account must have the authority to access the resources and perform the actions required by this activity.”

So since this is my demo environment I added the service account running the Runbook Service to the local administrator group on the Orchestrator server, restarted the Runbook Service so the group membership change was picked up and tried to run the activity again.

Success! 🙂