Tag: Kerrie Meyler

Book Review: System Center 2012 Orchestrator Unleashed

I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time and when I finally got it can fairly say it is worth it. Two of the authors I had pleaser to meet in person – Pete Zerger and Anders Bengtsson. If you have a chance to be on a event where they have presentation do not hesitate to attend it, it is a must see. The other three authors are also well known in the community – Kerrie Meyler, Marcus Oh and Kurt Van Hoecke. So when you join the powers of these five great experts you get great book about Orchestrator.

I will not go into details but the book will explain you in very understanding way the concept of Orchestrator. Once you are done with the concept you will learn how to install it and implement it which will help you to design Orchestrator implementations for a real world scenarios. Also in this part you will learn how to make runbooks and how you can achieve the same goal in many ways and most important how to improve your runbooks. The last part covers integration with the other System Center components. In this part the focus in showing you examples on how to accomplish certain scenarios and explaining how the runbooks for these scenarios were created and the logic behind them.

As a summary the best part of the book is that in every chapter there are tips from the field that will learn you for the best practices not only about Orchestrator and runbooks but also for orchestration, automation and integration as concepts. If you are looking for a source to learn Orchestrator I recommend you this book:

Book Review: System Center 2012 Operations Manager Unleashed

As I promised on my last book review next review is on System Center 2012 Operations Manager Unleashed. This book was anticipated last year but with the announcement of Service Pack 1 for System Center it was decided to be released in Q1 of 2013. The benefit of this delay is that includes information for System Center 2012 Operations SP1. The book is authored by three well known MVPs – Kerrie Meyler, Cameron Fuller and John Joyner. If we see the contributors in the book it is becoming even more interesting – Jonathan Almquist , Alex Fedotyev, Scott Moss , Oskar Landman, Marnix Wolf, and Pete Zerger. And last but not least technical editor is Kevin Holman. So we basically we have all star team participating in the writing of this book. But what actually the book brings to the table besides its famous authors and contributors?

Let’s start with that the book is 1528 pages. Within those 1528 there is no single unnecessary information. All topics are well structured and even when topics have touching points they are referenced properly to each other. I can clearly say that the authors have managed to cover OpsMger 2012 SP1 from end to end. I couldn’t find a topic or a feature that haven’t been described in this book. And by describe I do not mean just an overview. The book provides very deep technical knowledge for every feature of System Center 2012 Operations Manager SP1. Even if you think you know everything about SCOM I bet that in the book you can find something new. To provide even more depth the authors reference different blog posts over the book. These blog posts aim to give you more real world examples and deeper knowledge for SCOM. As I calculated it took me 4 days to read this book without reading these reference materials taking in consideration that I’ve skipped some parts of the book that I’ve already had knowledge of. Let’s say it simple: this book should be the bible for every OpsMgr 2012 administrator / engineer / specialist / consulted. In fact as System Center 2012 now is one product this book should be guide for every System Center 2012 specialist also. I recommend this book with two hands to every engineer who is designing, operating or administering SCOM 2012. No matter if you are just starting now with OpsMgr or you are administering SCOM for the last 5 years this book is for you. This is one of the best technical books I have read,

Feel free to purchase the book on one of the following websites:

I am looking forward for next Unleashed book for System Center 2012 component.