Tag: Pete Zerger

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:

SystemCenterCentral: Automatically Reset Unhealthy Unit Monitors (when alert closed in error by a human)

In the past to resolve such issues we had to implemented scripts that were triggered daily by the task scheduler on one of the management servers. Pete Zerger shows us a way how to use Orchestrator and be more effective. Read the about the solution here.

System Center Universe 2013 Presentations

System Center Universe 2013 was held in one week and a half and for those who didn’t managed to attend in person or couldn’t watched all sessions online you now have the chance to watch recordings online. The whole event was recorded in four parts:

Lunch Break – Cameron Fuller
Exploring the Dark Side of the Moon with OpsMgr – Maarten Goet
Cireson Sponsor Presentation – Paul Sutton and Shaun Ericson
Introduction to Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service – Joey Snow

Afternoon Break – Cameron Fuller
2013: An Orchestration Odyssey – Pete Zerger
Q&A with Panel of Experts – Shaun Ericson, Paul Sutton, Wally Mead, Travis Wright, Pete Zerger, Maarten Goet, Jason Sandys, Chris Ross, Joey Snow, Cameron Fuller

I’ve managed to watch online the presentations of Travis Wright and Pete Zerger and these are sessions that I would recommend for watching whatever your level of expertise is.

You can also download all presentations from here.

Ping SCCM collection members with PowerShell (sample script for ConfigMgr 2007 and 2012) developed by Pete Zerger

By reading the name of the article you can easily understand what this script does.

You can grab the scrip from here.

Thank you Pete fro sharing this script with the community.

OpsMgr 2012: Disabling Rules and Monitors in Bulk in PowerShell

Another great article by Pete Zerger. In this article he give us an example how to leverage PowerShell to bulk disable or enable monitors and rules.