What this book covers

This book covers the many aspects of Orchestrator 2012 R2, including a successful deployment, Runbook design, best practices, how and what to use to develop your own Integration Pack, as well as how to integrate existing ones.

Chapter 1, Configuring and Deploying Orchestrator 2012 R2, covers the infrastructure design aspect of Orchestrator 2012 R2 in a corporate environment, from a simple deployment with an all-in-one server to a more redundant and complex deployment, while we address the prerequisites, firewall ports, and other aspects of the configuration.

Chapter 2, Runbook Designer, focuses on the Runbook Designer. This will be the most used part for the IT administrator, creating the workflows and automatisms, and therefore, we'll address everything there is to know about the Runbook Designer component of Orchestrator 2012 R2.

Chapter 3, Orchestrator Integration Packs, covers the Orchestrator Integration Packs, how they work, and what they are, as well as importing some to our environment for the upcoming chapters.

Chapter 4, Extending Orchestrator, is all about how and where we'll address the Orchestrator capabilities of expansion and the services that surround it. We'll address, in more detail, the different ways that Orchestrator can be accessed and through which methods it can be extended in its capabilities. We'll also verify in more depth the best practices for these expansions, impacts, and troubleshooting scenarios.

Chapter 5, Runbook Examples, covers a series of sample Runbooks that are going to be explored and will serve as a base for you to create your own for the tasks you'll need to cover in your environment. The Runbooks that we're going to address at this point are going to be interconnected with their Integration Packs directly, therefore giving you a good understanding of how to work with them.

Chapter 6, Maintaining an Orchestrator Infrastructure, talks about maintenance being necessary to keep our Orchestrator happy and running. Troubleshooting will also be addressed, as well as backup and recovery.