Opalis Blog

We’ve Moved!

Robert_Hearn — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:13:00 GMT

In order to provide a more consistent experience with the System Center product family, we've moved new blog content from the Opalis, Orchestrator and System Center Cross Platform sites to other System Center sites.

For Opalis / Orchestrator content, see the Orchestrator blog at https://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator.

For Operations Manager cross-platform content, see the Operations Manager blog at https://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam.

Evaluating the Reach and Scale of Opalis Runbooks

J.C. Hornbeck — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 06:20:01 GMT

Adam Hall just announced a couple new articles that were published on Opalis and the next version of Opalis, Orchestrator:

We have published two new articles that discuss how to evaluate the Reach and Scale of Opalis. These articles and associated Runbooks were created and tested in Opalis, and they will equally apply to the Orchestrator Beta.

You can get all the details here.

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

New Configuration Manager 2007 IP Extension –Testers Needed!

Robert_Hearn — Wed, 18 May 2011 08:56:00 GMT

This post has been updated for Orchestrator 2012 and re-posted to the new Orchestrator blog site: https://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/archive/2012/05/07/new-configuration-manager-2007-ip-extension-testers-needed.aspx

Now available: The Opalis Integration Pack for PowerShell Script Execution

J.C. Hornbeck — Mon, 09 May 2011 09:43:00 GMT

Looks like Microsoft’s own Charles Joy announced the next addition to his collection of OIS 6.3 QIK based Integration Packs (IPs) on CodePlex. As you can see from the blog title, this one is all about PowerShell:

If you have worked with PowerShell in OIS, you have likely needed to reference blog posts which address workarounds for PS running from x64 machines:

My goal in building this IP was to eliminate the need for this workaround using the “Run .Net Script” object. In the workaround, not only do you have to increase the number of scripting lines, but you also have to include credential information (either as plain text in the script or stored as plain text in an OIS variable). I believe both of these limitations from the workaround have been addressed with this IP.

For all the details see Charles’ blog post here.

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

Automating a Hyper-V Integration Services upgrade with Opalis and SCVMM

J.C. Hornbeck — Mon, 02 May 2011 11:52:42 GMT

Not sure how I missed this one back when it first posted but our very own Charles Joy posted a great video demo over on his blog about how to use Opalis to update the Hyper-V VM integration components:

Have you recently upgraded your Windows Server 2008 R2 machine with Hyper-V to Service Pack 1? Well, some unique changes to Hyper-V come along with that upgrade. One of these is the need to upgrade the Integration Services (Components) for each of the VMs on your Hyper-V Server. This video shows how you can automate the upgrade of all your VMs utilizing OIS and the available VMM Integration Pack….

You can check out all the details here:

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

Handling PowerShell Switch Parameters in QIK CLI Activities

Robert_Hearn — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 14:50:00 GMT

This post has been revised for Orchestrator and moved to the Orchestrator blog here:

https://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/archive/2012/05/04/oit-quick-tip-using-powershell-switch-parameters-in-cli-activities.aspx

MSIT internal Opalis adoption - Using Opalis to Move Files Across Untrusted Domains

Adam Hall MSFT — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 18:40:00 GMT

This post was written by Marian Stanescu

I work in a small team at Microsoft that manages and monitors about 5,000 servers used to run a few of the larger Microsoft online sites. To process our data, we constantly need to move files across untrusted domains. We used to do this with a 3^rd party tool but it required its own infrastructure and management. Working with Opalis, we found a way to move those files using Opalis workflows. As this improvement has saved us a lot of time, I thought I would share the architecture and steps with this community.

We have a simple Opalis infrastructure where action servers in various domains are connected to the same database – through SQL authentication where needed. Here’s the steps we took to automate this process:

1. Create the file in one of the domains and save it as a txt file (same method could be used to transfer binary file however encoding needs to be used).

2. Start a workflow in the source domain, read the file from the beginning to the end (fig. 1) and flatten the output with option “separate with line breaks” (fig. 2). Put the data as a blob on the Opalis databus.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

3. Within the initial workflow call into another workflow that is scheduled to run on the destination domain (that is the workflow is specifically scheduled to run on an action server that exists in the destination domain) and pass the file data blob as an input to this second workflow (fig. 3). To be able to rebuild the file we also pass in the original file name.

Fig. 3

4. Save the blob into a SQL DB along with the file name. We use a column of type NTEXT in SQL to save the blob.

5. In the destination domain, we read the file name and the blob from SQL and restore the file to the original content on the disk (fig.4).

Fig. 4

As a note - the “string” parameter type (for Custom Start Object that we use in the policy receiving the blob) is stored by Opalis in an NTEXT SQL type column that can hold up to 2 GB data.

We have used this approach to move .txt files up to 1 MB. Using this solution, we have been able to:

1. Gain runtime access to business data across untrusted domains within one Opalis workflow

2. Move / Copy files across untrusted domains with Opalis

3. Leverage out-of- box functionality versus going to third-party tools

If you’re following me this far, chances are you run into this scenario as well. It’s pretty common, and also pretty simple to fix. Below’s a Visio that sums it all up.

Adam Hall
Snr. Technical Product Manager

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MMS BB53 session demo – Automated Protection of Resources

Adam Hall MSFT — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:56:02 GMT

As per the first post in this series, this article documents a demo that we did at MMS last week.

In this demo, I showed how we could automatically add a newly deployed server into the DPM protection cycle. This is a very simple demo, with only 4 activities!

The complete runbook looks like this.

As per all the other demos we do, we are showcasing one segment of a greater process, so we are using a Custom Start to pipe in the information that would typically come from an in-flight process such as a change control. Also, again, this is a demo runbook, and does not contain all the fail paths and best practices we recommend for production runbooks.

So now we have the input we require, which is the server that we want to add into the protection group of DPM. We do this in 2 steps. Firstly we need to get the Server information using the Server Name that was entered to start the runbook.

And then once we have the DPM information back, we can use that to get the further information required to add the Server into the Protection Group.

In our demo we hard coded that we would add the server into the “System Protection” group, however as per previous commentary this would typically be a dynamic entry. We specify a manual replica method, as the next activity will trigger the first Recovery Point creation.

And here in the last activity, using the newly created Data Source, we trigger the creation of the first recovery point.

And that’s it! A short, but very powerful demo of how we can automatically add new resources into protection cycles.

Adam Hall
Snr. Technical Product Manager

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MMS BB51 session demo – User Initiated Server Restart

Adam Hall MSFT — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:46:00 GMT

I am going to document and publish all the Opalis demos that I did at MMS, providing a description of what the scenario was and details on how I built it. The idea is to help you understand the process we go through, and give you ideas. You will always need to work through your own process and add in more steps for your environment

In this first demo, we did a simple scenario of allowing a non-administrative user to initiate a server restart, whilst capturing the event in Service Manager, taking a snapshot of the server prior and putting Operations Manager into maintenance mode during the restart.

The runbook for this demo looks like this:

Note that this is a demo runbook, and as such does not have all the error fail outs and best practices applied for designing runbooks. You should take a look at the work that Charles Joy has done to understand these aspects.

We are initiating this runbook from a Custom Start object. This is so that we can trigger this runbook manually for the demo, however it could also receive the required inputs from a previous segment of the process using the Trigger Policy activity.

The Custom Start activity is very simple, just asking for the name of the Server we want to restart:

Once we have this input, the first thing we are going to do is check that we have a unique name. To do this, we are going to ask VMM to return all server names that contain the string that we pass it. We could also at this point validate this in other ways if it was physical, or just use other methods like an AD lookup, ping test and so forth.

Once we have the results from VMM, we can use the Compare Values foundation activity to do a simple test.

If the count is 1, we know we have a unique name. Anything else and we either have an invalid name (i.e. a return of zero) or we have entered a name that that is not unique.

In the event that we do not get a return of 1, we fail out and send an e-mail to the user. Again, as this is a demo, I have hard coded some information, but you could pipe this in dynamically.

Now, if we did get a unique result we want to continue with the runbook. To ensure that we validate this, we need to edit the link after the Compare Values activity to only continue if the Comparison was True.

The next step in the runbook is to log an Incident in Service Manager to capture the information about the server restart request. To do this we use the Create Incident from Template activity.

We have selected the fields that we want to populate and then configured what information we want in those fields:

Now that we have the Incident logged, we can begin the restart process. First thing we do is put Operations Manager into maintenance mode for this server. We know we are going to make the server unavailable, we do not need to be alerted that this has happened.

Then we need to perform the snapshot. We already have all the information from VMM about which VM we want to snapshot so we can just subscribe to that Published Data.

And again, we use the same Published Data to shut down our server.

Now, we have to wait for the server to be shut down so we can start it back up again. You may ask why I shut it down and started again, as opposed to issuing a restart command. The answer is simple. There is no particular reason. Like most things in Opalis, there are many different ways to do something, and they all achieve the same outcome.

We also loop on this activity, polling to see when the VM meets this criteria.

Now that the server is shut down, we can start it up again.

Take the server back out of Maintenance Mode in Operations Manager …

And of course close out the Incident in Service Manager.

And there you have it, the breakdown of the demo that I did in BB51 at MMS

And as always, I welcome any feedback you have.

Adam Hall
Snr. Technical Product Manager

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New Community Opalis Integration Pack for System Center Service Manager

J.C. Hornbeck — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 07:06:17 GMT

Marcel Zehner over at SCSMFAQ.ch has recently built and made available a new Opalis integration pack for SCSM! For now it includes three new workflow activities:

Auto-close Resolved Incidents
Auto-close Resolved Problem
Export Unsealed Management Packs

For all the details and a download link see the following:

https://blog.scsmfaq.ch/2011/03/29/opalis-integration-pack-extension-for-service-manager/

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer