System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Configuring SCVMM to SCSM connector – finding the required Management Packs

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This post was written based on the experience with System Center 2012 R2. There are dozens of posts on the web and technet explaining how to configure the SCVMM connector in SCSM, but in this post I just want to explain where you can find the management packs required for this.

Setting up SCOM, SCCM, AD, SCORCH connectors in SCSM is really easy. It’s so easy that when you start configuring the SCVMM connector, you start thinking that it should be another way of doing this.

In order to get SCVMM objects on SCSM, you actually need SCOM as sort of a “proxy” doing the discovery. Since this connector does a mapping between SCOM and SCSM objects, you need to install some MPs both on SCOM and SCSM. The cool part starts when you want to find these MPs. I would say below is a quick and dirty walkthrough, but it’s actually not that quick.

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Child runbooks in Orchestrator: Automating an uniquely named,fully patched VM with basic apps installed.

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I always see people comparing PowerShell with Orchestrator, or thinking of Orchestrator as a GUI for PowerShell. From my point of view the real power of Orchestrator lies in its capabilities to integrate at different levels to multiple systems and bring them together in a simple “runbook”.

Finally in this post, we can bring together all the previous runbooks and get to experiment with child runbooks. For this all the previous runbooks have to be ready:

Another prerequisite for this runbook is having a VM template (with Windows 7 in my case) ready for deployment.

Scenario

The main idea, when creating these little runbooks, was to have a VM that:

  • Was auto generated
  • Has an unique name that complies with a specific standard
  • Is fully patched
  • Has a minimum of applications installed

Following this scenario, we easily get to connect to Active Directory, Exchange, SCCM and SCVMM. And we could go even further, by integrating this runbook with SCSM, for change management (future post).

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Generate Unique VM Name

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This small runbook is a demonstration on how to use counters and variables and some basic smart link conditions. It also emphasizes one important difference between Opalis and SC Orchestrator (spoiler: cycles are not allowed! More about this on this cool post: http://www.sc-orchestrator.eu/index.php/scoblog/49-cycles-in-pipleline-mode)

The scenario for this runbook: You want to create a VM but you want the name to be auto-generated following some basic naming convention and you want to make sure that is unique. You also might have users manually creating VMs using the same naming conventions so you need to check this carefully. The runbook will look like this:

Unique VM Name

 

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