System Center Orchestrator 2012 RC: Installation Experience

The System Center 2012 product line is nearing its final release date. Beta and release candidate versions are publicly available and can be tested. You can download the bits from here.

There are three separate downloads available:

1. System_Center_2012_Orchestrator_RC.exe
   this is the actual product and is around 60 MB. Pretty slick!
2. System_Center_2012_Orchestrator_Integration_Packs_RC.exe
   this are the integration packs you need to use when you want to create runbooks involving SCOM 2007, SCSM 2010, SCVMM 2008, DPM 2010 and SCCM 2007
3. System_Center_2012_Orchestrator_Integration_Toolkit_RC.exe
   this one is needed if you want to use the Orchestrator SDK to create custom integration packs

System Requirements

I think it’s interesting and notable that Orchestrator needs you to have Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 and .NET 4.0 (when you install the web features) installed. If you want to use the integration toolkit, you need Windows 7 (or Windows Server 2008 R2) with .NET 3.5 installed. If memory server, MS supported older OS/SQL/Frameworks in the past so it seems there was a strategy shift. In my opinion this makes total sense. It’s easier to support, maintain and test a product in an environment like this. Hopefully we see improvements in quality as well.

Installation

Before I start with the installation I always ensure that my OS and components are up-to-date. SQL Server 2008 R2 is also installed and up-to-date. Before you proceed you might also check out the deployment guide and release notes: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh237242.aspx

After you’ve started setuporchestrator.exe the setup bootstrapper appears and we click on “Install” to start the

installation:

One thing I forgot before I installed Orchestrator, was installing the IIS role. After I selected “Install” from the bootstrapper, skipped the license key page and agreed to the license terms, you’ll see a feature picker where you can choose what components should be installed on the machine:

As you can see, I’ve selected all components to be installed and the web service component even states that it needs IIS. Clicking on Next…

Here you see that the Prerequisites check complains about the memory but still nothing about IIS. This is only a warning and you can skip it by just clicking Next…

The next screen mentions that the setup is missing the IIS role and the nice thing is: setup will install the role for you. Very convenient! After clicking Next, setup will install IIS role:

After a while setup is happy and allows you to continue:

The rest of the installation is pretty painless. The following wizard pages provide good instructions on what is needed and where to read more about it. To make this blog post complete I will attach the other screenshots as well.

After the summary page, installation takes off:

Installing a single server containing all components of SCO is very easy and I’m really impressed with the simple setup experience. However, there are a couple of things you have to keep in mind:

• An SCO deployment can only have one Management server. In the previous screenshot you’ve seen that you cannot uncheck this component. So there’s no redundancy or failover system for this component. So if your management server dies you can still execute runbooks using the Orchestration console but you cannot connect to your SCO deployment using the Runbook Designer!
• To install additional runbook servers or web service installations you need to start the appropriate installations from the bootstrapper in the “Standalone Installations” section: