Chapter 1: Introducing Opalis Integration Server 6.3

	Excerpt from System Center Opalis Integration Server 6.3 Unleashed.
By Kerrie Meyler, Mark Gosson, and Charles Joy Published by Sams ISBN-10: 0-672-33561-1 ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33561-7

In This Chapter

• What Is Opalis?

• Microsoft’s Automation Platform

• Where OIS Fits Within the System Center Suite

• The History of Opalis Software

• OIS 6.3 and Beyond

• Understanding IT Process Automation

Opalis Integration Server (OIS), a new member to Microsoft’s System Center Suite, automates end-to-end processes by traversing organizational boundaries, reducing operational costs, and improving Information Technology (IT) efficiency by delivering services faster and with fewer errors. It orchestrates and integrates management and infrastructure tools in support of best practices and standards initiatives such as the Information Technology Information Library (ITIL) and Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF).

This chapter introduces OIS, its position as Microsoft’s automation platform, where it fits within the System Center family, and includes a discussion of what’s new for this, the “last OIS.” Microsoft made the decision to include OIS as part of the System Center suite; this chapter helps you begin to take a closer look at the product.

What Is Opalis?

Microsoft acquired Opalis Software, Inc., (referred to as Opalis Software throughout this chapter) in December 2009. Previously privately owned, Opalis Software became a Microsoft subsidiary. For information on the history of Opalis Software, refer to the section, “The History of Opalis Software,” later in this chapter. At the time of the acquisition, Opalis Software was best known for the OIS product.

At its core, OIS is software designed as a platform for automation, orchestration, and integration. In conversations discussing OIS, you are likely to hear at least one of these three expressions. The other things you can expect to hear is the amount of time you are saving, how you are driving costs down, and how much more reliable your IT processes have become.

These are significant themes, as OIS enables you and your IT organization to make best practices a reality, in an automated way. These best practices can but do not have to be based on MOF or ITIL; they can be as simple as lessons learned over the years. Either way, OIS can help facilitate automation of these best practices. OIS’s automation, orchestration, and integration capabilities enable you to coordinate all your data center management tools to perform the tasks prescribed by these best practices.

Let’s begin looking at OIS by viewing Figure 1.1, which displays the OIS client user interface. This example shows a workflow monitoring Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and creating Microsoft System Center Service Manager incidents, escalating them as necessary; it is a nice illustration of integration, orchestration, and automation.

Figure 1.1

The OIS Client user interface

Automation, Orchestration, and Integration

Consider OIS as the underlying platform enabling you to orchestrate everything else. Orchestration and automation usually go hand in hand. Where orchestration is the external management of an application or applications, automation is the programmed execution of tasks within and between those applications. All that is missing is how OIS connects to these applications to perform the orchestrated management and automation tasks.

Without integration capabilities, the product’s benefit to the data center would be greatly decreased. Integration is the connection created between OIS and an integration surface on the application or applications to be orchestrated and automated.

Workflow

When OIS connects to these integration surfaces, you can link together a series of out-of-the-box or extensibility actions to form a policy. A policy is an integrated action or collection of linked integrated actions, which is a part of a greater process. In these processes, individual policies are frequently linked together. Instead of calling them a series of linked policies, these have come to be known as workflows. In OIS, the terms process, workflow, and policy are often used interchangeably. Figure 1.2 is an example of a policy; this is a portion of the workflow previously depicted in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.2

An OIS policy

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Referring to Policies Versus Workflows 

The OIS application utilizes the term policy, the term this book will use when referring to OIS components. Outside the application, when referring to groupings of policies or the process as a whole, the authors will use the term workflow.

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After it is completely configured, a workflow becomes the best practice process. The process dictates those orchestrated management and automation tasks you need to perform, while each action in the process contains information about the integration to each device or system you will manage.

OIS Connects the Data Center

Collecting these workflows (and the platform on which they are built) becomes the foundation for your time and cost savings and improved reliability in your data center. With the ease of building and maintaining this foundation, you will realize a swift return on investment and continual gains in operational efficiency and notice a stronger alignment between your business and IT services as best practices become an IT reality. Bringing your data center together using OIS can make you that IT hero you always wanted to be!

Microsoft’s Automation Platform

Whether you work in a data center or manage one, you know the struggles and pain involved for it to run smoothly. For every device you manage and system you maintain, there seem to be at least that many other solutions available to do the job. You have a mix of legacy, old, new, and sometimes bleeding-edge technology, all in one place and demanding attention. Without automation, keeping up with it all is a challenging task.

To assist with this endeavor, Microsoft offers a wide range of products, known as System Center. The System Center offering is considered by many as one of the most popular suites to create and manage an automated data center. With products such as Operations Manager, Service Manager, Configuration Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Data Protection Manager, AVIcode, and now OIS, Microsoft has you covered. Indeed, the acquisition of Opalis Software and bringing OIS into System Center is what solidified Microsoft’s place in the automated data center. Using OIS lets you automate, orchestrate, and integrate.

OIS not only integrates to each of the other System Center Suite products, but also just about any other technology in the data center. The capabilities of this fully integrated, heterogeneous platform are what caught the eye of the software giant. In the time since the acquisition, and especially since the release of OIS 6.3 and the System Center Integration Packs, it has become clear that OIS is Microsoft’s automation platform of choice.

Microsoft Before OIS

This is not to say Microsoft did not have automation capability prior to the OIS acquisition. Whether you used batch files, scripting, PowerShell, workflows in SharePoint, or SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), you were automating. These methods and others are still available. Many of the products are completely self-sufficient; some have robust integration and automation capabilities built in. As an example, Service Manager has out-of-the-box connectors to Active Directory, Operations Manager, and Configuration Manager; all which allow you to get a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) up and running in several hours.

Adding OIS to the Picture

With OIS, you can bring it all together. With the products and scenario mentioned in the previous section, you can build a workflow to

• Respond to alerts from Operations Manager.

• Read data from the Service Manager CMDB.

• Correlate the data from Operations Manager, the CMDB, and Configuration Manager.

• Take action on the impacted devices and remediate the root cause of the alert.

• Keep the incident and problem management systems up to date throughout the process.

The remediation can be as easy as

• Deploying software using the Configuration Manager Integration Pack,

• Executing a PowerShell script, or

• Calling a third-party tool to perform maintenance actions.

OIS makes irrelevant whether the data center is a heterogeneous mix of technologies or how many IT silos exist, what time it is, or how many people are on call at the time of the alert. You will notice the data center is continually growing closer to when it will become self-sufficient.

Making the Difference: The Data Bus

What OIS brings to the table is its data bus technology. This is a unique capability built into the OIS workflow engine used to integrate systems without code. It is not Windows Workflow Foundation nor is it like anything in the existing Microsoft stack. The technology came with the product during the acquisition, and it is what makes OIS so powerful yet easy to use.

Rather than using the more common symbolic variable method for intra-workflow data transfer, the Data Bus contains all execution data from every object in a workflow. During workflow design, data from the first workflow object is available to all other downstream objects. This technology makes it possible to create fully dynamic workflows. Using the Data Bus removes hard coding and thus lowers maintenance costs; creating workflows is becomes as easy as creating rules in Outlook.

In addition to ease of use, the power of the Data Bus becomes most apparent during workflow runtime. Execution of fully dynamic workflows means you can build in a certain amount of intelligence. Parallel processing, branching, execution time decision making, and context adaptive processing are possible because of the Data Bus.

Flexibility

In the modern data center, there are as many integration points as devices. An automation platform must be able to handle workflows not only with System Center-only technologies but a mix of System Center, third-party and competitor products, and cross-platform devices and software. OIS’s flexibility is crucial for meeting the requirements of an automated data center. Here is a list of capabilities illustrating the flexibility of OIS:

• Allows for multivendor integration to your existing tools

• Does not require you to rip and replace any of your existing solutions

• Does not necessitate lock-in to one vendor solution or stack

• Offers prebuilt activities and workflow processes, ready for your customization, to speed up time to value and illustrate sample best practices

• Facilitates your best practice processes and does not corner you in with simplistic boilerplate offerings

• Puts you in control of the Data Bus’s power—automation, orchestration, and integration at your fingertips, with easy-to-use workflow creation practices

• Provides the choice during design time to use a forms-based configuration or create and utilize code and scripts

• Supports dynamic workflow creation, which in turn enables workflow intelligence during execution time

These features enabled OIS to become Microsoft’s automation platform for System Center. With an automation platform in place, System Center can facilitate more enhanced and end-to-end solutions, solving many common issues and pain points in the typical data center. With your pain points and issues addressed, you have more time for innovation, continual improvement, and transformation—the type of transformation that moves your data center from common to extraordinary (or “basic” to “dynamic” per Microsoft’s Infrastructure Optimization model).

OIS in the Real World

With everything moving toward automation and ultimately the cloud, OIS can continue to fill all the right gaps in the system management space. Here are issues and pain points addressed by the System Center solution with OIS:

• Mean time to response/repair takes too long

• Too much reliance on subject matter experts, which increases costs and response time

• No visibility from owner to owner during an alert/outage, resulting in non-repeatable remediation actions

• No documented process

• Processes not being followed

• Processes that are too manual

• Operational expenses are too high

• Poor performance during alert/outage remediation

• Extended downtime during alert/outage

• No audit capabilities

Many of these items relate to alert/outage downtime and remediation. Though just one area a solution using OIS can address, it is one of the most important and ubiquitous. OIS is best equipped for this type of solution as it was designed to interact with all the tools necessary to remediate impacted systems. It can also interact with all the tools required to track the alert/outage in the incident and problem management systems. This ensures ITIL or MOF best practices are followed, even during an emergency when some steps in a manual process might be shortcut to save time.

This type of end-to-end process management is often referred to as Information Technology Process Automation (ITPA), discussed in the “Understanding IT Process Automation” section of this chapter. Each feature of the OIS offering enables ITPA. With its addition to Microsoft’s family of products, OIS enables System Center with ITPA capabilities, solidifying its place in the automated data center and private cloud.

Results

Imagine being able to simplify the most manual, error prone and time-intensive tasks down to several workflows. These workflows are powerful enough to interpret different types of data on the fly, flexible enough to be a reusable solution catalog as your automation needs grow, and easy enough to create and understand that even people new to the product can operate and maintain them with minimal overhead. Rather than being theoretical, you can experience this reality shortly after installing and deploying OIS.

Adding the other System Center products into this equation makes the results even more impressive. Deploying the entire System Center suite enables you to provide end-to-end data center management. Alerts from your operations management tools will automatically flow into your service management tools; remediation of those alerts will be orchestrated through your configuration management and virtualization management tools, and an integrated combination of your backup and recovery tools ensures data integrity throughout the process. This is not magic; it is the first realization of the dynamic data center.

Where OIS Fits Within the System Center Suite

By becoming part of the System Center suite, OIS joins the ranks of many longtime established products and solutions. Table 1.1 presents a listing of data center solution areas with their corresponding System Center product.

Table 1.1  System Center Suite Solution Areas

As it was added through acquisition, there might be some functional overlap, but OIS does not replace the functionality of any existing System Center product. Rather, OIS enhances and extends the existing capabilities, enabling System Center with ITPA. Its addition fills the few gaps that existed between these products by offering automation, orchestration, and integration. OIS also enables third-party application management. This enables System Center to grow into existing heterogeneous automated data centers or gives you the ability to build a new one.

It’s not really about how OIS fits into System Center; the acquisition did not force an unwanted spoke into the System Center wheel. OIS strengthens all the existing spokes and thus the wheel itself. Here are the capabilities of the products in the System Center suite, as described at https://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/products.aspx:

• Configuration Manager—Assesses, deploys, and updates servers, client computers, and devices across physical, virtual, distributed, and mobile environments.

• Operations Manager—End-to-end service management product that is the best choice for Windows because it works seamlessly with Microsoft software and applications, helping organizations increase efficiency while enabling greater control of the IT environment.

• Data Protection Manager—Delivers enterprise-class data protection and scalability. Data Protection Manager provides unified data protection for Windows servers such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, virtualization, and file servers, in addition to Windows desktops and laptops.

• Virtual Machine Manager—Provides a management solution for today’s virtualized data center, affording centralized management of the IT infrastructure, increased server utilization capability, and dynamic resource optimization across multiple virtualization and physical platforms.

• Service Manager—Designed to meet the needs of the modern IT help desk. By providing powerful new capabilities for incident, problem, asset, and change management, Service Manager supports organizations as they seek to improve the service they provide to their users.

• Opalis Integration Server—Provides IT process automation of incident response, provisioning, virtual lifecycle management, and change management. This is achieved through a workflow environment that orchestrates and integrates System Center tools with third-party management tools, enabling interoperability and process consistency across the data center.

• AVIcode—Delivers .NET application performance monitoring capabilities to help ensure the availability of business-critical applications and services, regardless of where they are deployed.

Enhancing, Extending, and Enabling System Center

Table 1.1 showed how the existing five System Center products fit in with the five solution areas. OIS integrates with and supplements the existing functionality of the existing System Center products. The next sections show how OIS enhances, extends, and enables ITPA for those solution areas.

Solution Area 1: Incident/Change Management

Here are some sample capabilities showing how OIS fits in with the existing System Center service management solution. OIS adds the ability to

• Automate the remediation of alerts

• Orchestrate incident management through to resolution

• Integrate Service Manager with third-party IT service management (ITSM) tools for service desk synchronization

• Integrate across monitoring tools, service desks, and CMDBs

• Facilitate ITIL or MOF best practice processes

For a discussion of OIS’s integration with Service Manager, see Chapter 10, “Integration with System Center Service Manager.”

Solution Area 2: Virtual Workload Provisioning

This next list illustrates some sample capabilities and how OIS fits in with the existing System Center virtualization solution. OIS adds the ability to

• Automate provisioning, resource allocation, and retirement.

• Orchestrate third-party virtualization tools for virtual machine life-cycle management.

• Integrate Virtual Machine Manager or Hyper-V with third-party virtualization tools for multivendor virtualization solutions.

• Extend virtual machine management to the cloud.

Chapter 12, “Integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager,” includes a discussion of the VMM Integration Pack.

Solution Area 3: OS/Software Deploy, Patching

Here are some sample capabilities showing how OIS fits in with the existing System Center configuration management solution. OIS adds the capability to:

• Automate cluster patching.

• Orchestrate configuration across platforms and tools.

• Triage end points where patching cannot proceed because of service or application issues.

• Integrate Configuration Manager with third-party configuration management tools for end-to-end closed loop compliance.

The Configuration Manager IP is discussed in Chapter 11, “Integration with System Center Configuration Manager.”

Solution Area 4: Performance and Health Monitoring

This next list illustrates some sample capabilities and how OIS fits in with the existing System Center operations management solution. OIS adds the ability to

• Automate alert monitoring across the data center to simplify event management.

• Orchestrate third-party monitoring tools delivering important incident and problem data to Service Manager.

• Integrate Operations Manager with third-party monitoring tools for event correlation and consolidation compliance.

See Chapter 9, “Integration with System Center Operations Manager,” for a discussion of the Operations Manager IP.

Solution Area 5: Backup and Restore/Disaster Recovery

The following list illustrates some sample capabilities and how OIS fits in with the existing System Center backup management solution. OIS adds the ability to

• Automate virtual machine, SharePoint farm, and SQL Server protection and recovery.

• Orchestrate third-party backup and recovery tools for end-to-end data protection.

• Integrate Data Protection Manager with third-party tools to trigger data protection based on alerts, planned maintenance, or as part of a change management process.

Chapter 13, “Integration with System Center Data Protection Manager,” discusses the Data Protection Manager IP.

Transforming the Data Center

With all these tools and capabilities, System Center has the ability to transform data centers from hard to manage, slow moving entities into agile, responsive, and well-managed assets. Whether your end goal is to make your data center more dynamic or if you plan the full journey to the cloud, taking advantage of what System Center with OIS has to offer will make the transition more automated, orchestrated, and integrated.

Here are desired results you can realize by taking advantage of System Center with OIS:

• Lower costs

• Improved operational efficiency

• Increased responsiveness, flexibility, and control

• Reliable services with optimized infrastructure

OIS with System Center enables you to get this and more with a simple, familiar, and consistent platform. You can manage your applications, platforms, and infrastructure whether they are physical, virtual, or in the cloud with one set of tools, powered by OIS. Opalis Integration Server is Microsoft’s automation platform. It and System Center form the backbone of on-premise, private, and public cloud data centers.

The History of Opalis Software

Opalis Software has its roots in France, where the first OpalisRobot automation utility was created in 1995 by a network administrator frustrated with the lack of automation capabilities for performing his day-to-day duties on Windows NT Server 3.5. The idea was then considerably ahead of its time. Even in its earliest versions, the product was more than a job scheduler, as OpalisRobot was capable of monitoring for certain conditions (file system, SQL query results, calendar) and triggering actions (run a program, file management, Service interaction, SQL query) in response to these conditions.

Rendezvous with Destiny

As the Windows NT market matured, Opalis Software continued to add capabilities to OpalisRobot while also creating a new line of products dedicated to managed file-transfer—OpalisRendezVous. OpalisRendezVous had a simple graphical user interface (GUI), and made the tasks of transferring files to or from a FTP site, file shares, or databases extremely easy. Similar to OpalisRobot, OpalisRendezVous was extremely resilient and maintenance-free. There are still instances of OpalisRendezVous running today, although the code hasn’t been updated in over a decade. Figure 1.3 shows the OpalisRendezVous interface.

Figure 1.3

OpalisRendezVous Administrator interface

Though the interface was simplistic, the tasks it enabled and the way they were initiated revolutionized how IT organizations managed data distribution across the data center. Configuring what were referred to as flows was as easy as workflow configuration is today in OIS. Figure 1.4 illustrates a sample OpalisRendezVous flow configuration screen.

Figure 1.4

OpalisRendezVous flow configuration interface

By filling out the When, What, and Where tabs in the flow configuration screen, an administrator could quickly transform a manual file distribution process into an automatic and scheduled flow. The After tab enabled specifying actions to perform based on the execution status of the flow. These conditions included If flow completes, If flow fails, and If nothing to do. Available actions were Trigger OpalisRobot Event/Task on local/remote server, Trigger OpalisRendezVous flows on local/remote server, and Send detailed flow report by email. The implementation of these concepts in an easy-to-use application paved the way for what Opalis Software would eventually deliver as OIS.

Do the Robot!

In 1997, the marketing tagline for OpalisRobot was “Efficient Automation and Remote Administration.” Opalis Software then took the product beyond the Windows utility market, making their automation product line available worldwide.

OpalisRobot 3.0 was released at the end of that year, combining a drag-and-drop workflow user interface with event-driven automation capabilities, the first seen in the industry. Most of the Foundation objects available today with OIS 6.3 were developed at this time. The release of the Add-on Software Development Kit (SDK) added to the value of the product, enabling third parties to extend OpalisRobot’s functionality by adding new types of automation objects.

An RBA Tool for Your Department Admin

While OpalisRobot was competing mostly with job schedulers, its functionality already defined what would later become Runbook Automation (RBA). Because the product possessed monitoring capabilities, it also was used as a departmental monitoring solution—sometimes competing with dedicated event management systems from vendors such as HP and BMC. Its unique capabilities are those now associated with RBA—the ability to perform corrective actions such as restarting services, purging log files, and so on. This effectively provided the tools needed to create self-healing systems and applications, a relatively unknown concept at the time. (As an example, Microsoft did not announce the Dynamic Systems Initiative until 2003.)

The first series of Add-ons (now known as Integration Packs) were released in 1998. The Call Add-on provided Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) through dedicated hardware from Dialogic, and the Email Add-on added inbound email processing capabilities. By using CTI, OpalisRobot could call a network administrator to inform them of an application issue. The network administrator could then use the dial pad to control any of the NT 4.0 servers in the network to perform corrective actions or playback event log messages. A SNMP Add-on and updates to OpalisRendezVous soon followed.

In 1999 the company created a North American sales office and consolidated the French development office and Sales and Marketing teams that had been in the Netherlands. Opalis Software became based in Toronto, Canada.

OpalisRobot 4.0 was released in 2002. It used a new codebase and included a fresh new user interface (UI) and automation objects. Some of these objects are still available in the Integration Server product in the legacy category.

Version 4 was also Opalis Software’s first (and only) attempt to make OpalisRobot available on multiple platforms; a Linux and Solaris version of OpalisRobot 4 shipped in 2003. This was also the first time Opalis Software used the term IT Process Automation.

Opalis Software secured its first round of venture capital finance in 2004; this led to sunsetting the OpalisRendezVous product and OpalisRobot-based solutions as the company began to focus on the nascent IT Process Automation market and to align itself to automation initiatives from BMC, HP, CA, and Microsoft.

The Idea of Data Center Integration and CAPs

The term Data Center Integration was born with a new series of Add-ons released that supported this effort. Opalis Software’s focus was now on providing integration and orchestration capabilities for management systems in the data center.

The company released the Connector Access Pack (CAP) for MOM in June 2004 and participated as a Microsoft System Center partner for the Operations Manager 2005 product launch. While Opalis Software released CAPs (later called Integration Packs) for Veritas Backup Exec, Remedy AR system, VMware Server, Microsoft SMS, and others, it was also busy creating the next generation of IT process automation software—to be called Opalis Integration Server.

What Rhymes with OIS?

By 2004, as Robot sales continued, it was clear that the product had the right idea but needed a refresh and modernization. Was the underlying code base the correct one moving forward? The answer was no. While Robot was an incredibly robust product like RendezVous before it, it was mired in a workgroup, or departmental domain mindset. Its architectural limitations made it clear that Robot would not be the vehicle to take the company forward.

OIS 5.0 was released in October 2005. This enterprise class automation platform, combined with Integration Packs for many common systems management products, enabled Opalis Software to dominate the ITPA/RBA market as an independent vendor until the Microsoft acquisition in December 2009. This gave Microsoft an immediate winning solution in a new market.

Introducing OIS 5.0

The first version of OIS was certainly a version 1.0 product, but the 5.0 moniker signified it would carry on the RBA torch from Robot (and that Robot would never leave the 4.x version world). Opalis Software also labeled the product 5.0 to avoid the impression that it was a first release product with typical first release issues.

Architectural Changes

OIS was clearly a different product from Robot. Although the most obvious architectural change was using a proper database as its backend, there were other changes as well:

• Loosely indexed file replaced by a proper database

• Scalable, multitier architecture using services that could run across multiple servers

• Remote deployment and update

• Load balancing across servers and object level failover (object level failover never worked properly and was quickly removed)

• Logging and reporting with a dashboard

• Active Directory integration

An Enterprise RBA Tool Becomes ITPA

With its improved architecture and design, OIS was ready to take the ideas of RBA and move past the single department administrator. After the tool was introduced to an enterprise, its value became clear; although the need for additional integration was also apparent. An enterprise has a large number of tools and departments. For the tool to see its full value, OIS had to incorporate the needs of all those departments.

This stage of the OIS lifecycle while ITIL was becoming popular in the UK and Europe, where Opalis Software did about 50% of its sales, and as the seeds of ITIL started to take hold in North America. This perfect storm of opportunity gave rise to OIS’s popularity. Taking an RBA tool into the data center while the ITIL framework was being broadly adopted led to Opalis Software creating many more IPs and transforming OIS into the first ITPA tool in the market. With the tool built, next steps were to build awareness and sales.

Given the number of moving parts in Figure 1.7, explaining how OIS enables ITPA and facilitates ITIL was not an easy task. After implementation the value of ITPA and ITIL are obvious; however, it was another story to convince IT organizations to change how they view their tools, uproot years of manual processes, and install a new product that would do it all. Opalis Software was paving the way for all ITPA tools to come.

The transition to an ITPA tool was not without problems. The first versions of OIS struggled with a number of issues presented by the data center, but because the tool was so versatile, any problem could be worked around, even when it was a product limitation introduced by OIS! The early adopters and implementers understood the potential and deployed the product despite any shortcomings. They demanded more IPs, and Opalis Software delivered. At the time of the Microsoft acquisition, there were nearly 40 IPs, many written for a single customer.

Two Types of Workflow Engines and 6.0

As the product continued to mature, the product version numbers rose as well. By the time OIS reached version 5.45 in early 2008, it had become clear that the workflow engine used by the product had several serious problems and needed to be corrected. This correction was the single largest change to the product since transitioning from Robot to OIS.

The change was composed of a new workflow engine called Pipeline mode, branching continuing support for the previous engine, now called Legacy mode. For more information about workflow engines see Chapter 7, “Implementation and Best Practices.” This change also meant that a number of existing objects would become Legacy objects (only usable in Legacy mode) and require rewriting for the new engine. Curiously, this major change was only a dot release to OIS 5.6. However, this would be the final 5.x version of OIS. What would have been OIS 5.7 was rebranded OIS 6.0 as part of a marketing effort. Despite the major version change, 5.6 and 6.0 were far more similar than 5.5 and 5.6.

It was clear from the traction by analysts that the ITPA or RBA space was becoming popular and large software companies would be interested in acquiring the players in the space—such as Opalis Software, iConclude, and RealOps (all of which were eventually acquired). Opalis Software was the last to be acquired, possibly because the company struck up a number of OEM deals; first with BladeLogic (later acquired by BMC), and later with CA. These OEM partnerships probably helped discourage an outright purchase. Unfortunately, these OEM deals ended as the company’s investors found themselves in the 2008 economic downturn. The investors wanted to reclaim some of their investments, and Opalis Software was one of the few companies with a bright outlook, bright enough to seek a buyer.

OIS 6.2.2: The Final Frontier

As part of the acquisition process by Microsoft, Opalis Software was required to release a final version of OIS suitable for use by Microsoft and its customers. This version would be a modification of OIS 6.2 in which all the elements that contained open source would be remediated and ultimately removed, including the Opalis Operator Console. The resulting product, OIS 6.2.2, is the last version of OIS to be released as a full product complete with an installer. All subsequent releases of OIS (OIS 6.2.2 Service Pack 1 and OIS 6.3) would be released as product patches, with the core OIS 6.2.2 installation source untouched.

Microsoft Acquires Opalis

On December 10, 2009, Microsoft announced its acquisition of Opalis Software, making it a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. Because OIS was the only software then sold by Opalis Software, this meant Microsoft was getting an ITPA tool.

Microsoft decided to make OIS part of the System Center suite and chose not to sell the product standalone. This means that the only way for a customer to get OIS is by purchasing the System Center suite through System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) or Server Management Suite Datacenter (SMSD). At the time of writing, there are seven members of the suite with respect to SMSE/D:

• System Center Operation Manager

• System Center Configuration Manager

• System Center Service Manager

• System Center Data Protection Manager

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager

• Opalis Integration Server

• AVIcode

Product Challenges

There have been a number of challenges associated with the transition, from both Microsoft’s and the customer’s perspective:

• The manual processes required to install the product—The final version of OIS by Opalis Software was version 6.2.2. This was a remediated version of 6.2.1 in which all components unacceptable to Microsoft were removed (mostly objects based on open source and the Opalis Operator Console). It was important Microsoft had a complete and suitable version of OIS to make available until they were ready to rebrand it. There were three main reasons for this:

  • Microsoft wanted to keep OIS available and in market after the acquisition, as they felt the product would bring value to their customers. Often software from an acquired company is pulled down while it is rebranded and reworked internally.
  • When Microsoft started to actively modify the code and make it available, the product would be subject to a number of legal hurdles the company wasn’t ready to address. Essentially, as soon as Microsoft released it, OIS would be a Microsoft product and not the product of a subsidiary.
  • The last reason accounts for the unusual installation and upgrade process. Because OIS is a product of Opalis Software, Microsoft could provide only an upgrade in the form of patches, rather than a full installer. Knowing this makes the upgrade process from 6.2 to 6.3 make a bit more sense. Think of it as upgrading an Oldsmobile. Although the manufacturer went out of business in 2004, you can still get new parts and bolt them on; but without an Oldsmobile dealer, you cannot buy a 2011 Oldsmobile Cutlass.

• The challenges around installing the Opalis Operator Console—These came about in the same way as installing the product itself. Microsoft was left with two options with regard to the Opalis Operator Console when it acquired the product: Allow customers to use it or use nothing. Because the console provides a number of features and several large customers use it actively, instructions on how to obtain and install it were included with the product. However, the console is based on Sun’s Java, and Microsoft is not able to distribute the bits. This leaves you with a manual installation requiring 17 separate downloads.

OIS 6.3 and Beyond

Barring the possibility of a minor release or service pack (SP), version 6.3 will be the last version in the OIS legacy. From here, the product takes on a new moniker, officially making it a Microsoft and System Center product. The new name, announced in March 2011, is System Center Orchestrator (SCO). Orchestrator will be part of the v.Next wave, scheduled to begin releasing late 2011. Anticipated changes include enhancements and bug fixes, but the majority of changes will be certification-related. In the overall structure of the product itself, its workflow engine, naming conventions, and best practices are anticipated to remain largely unchanged.

What did Microsoft deem as the most important final updates to the OIS legacy? Here is a list of new major functionality additions for OIS 6.3:

• Updated Integration Pack for System Center Operations Manager

• New Integration Pack for System Center Service Manager

• New Integration Pack for System Center Configuration Manager

• New Integration Pack for System Center Virtual Machine Manager

• New Integration Pack for System Center Data Protection Manager

• Support for install and execution of OIS on Windows Server 2008 platforms, including Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64), Windows Server 2008 (x64), Windows Server 2008 (x86), and all previously supported platforms

• Support for install and execution of the OIS Client on Windows 7 and all previously supported platforms

For full documentation on the OIS 6.3 release, visit the online TechNet Library for OIS at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff630946.aspx.

SCO 2012 Differences

A full view into what Microsoft intends to change between OIS and SCO is not yet available, but there are several items officially acknowledged or firmly anticipated by the community.

• New Operator Console—The existing Opalis Operator Console will be completely discarded and replaced with a Silverlight-based web console. This is no surprise to those familiar with the existing version. Considering the existing console is based on Java, requires numerous individual downloads, and has an onerous installation, it is clear change is needed. By using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, the future console can be shipped with the core product and have a proper installer.

• A Uniform Installation—As SCO will be a full Microsoft product, it will have an installer similar to the other System Center tools. Although it is too soon to know exactly what shape that will take, installing the product will not require manually copying files into deeply nested directories.

• Standardization—One of the by-products of being a full Microsoft product is SCO will meet the high standards of excellence the company requires. As an example, OIS 6.3 is not supported on non-English version operating systems and likewise is supported only with English versions of SQL. This is anticipated to change with SCO. Microsoft’s significant engineering and testing resources will help make SCO a better, more standard product than OIS.

SCO 2012 Similarities

There are several areas not expected to change between OIS and SCO 2012.

• Look and feel—The overall look of the SCO UI is not expected to change much from that of OIS. Given the tight deadlines and the many other changes that will be made, the UI will probably look similar to OIS. That is important for companies and users who invest time and resources into learning OIS now, as these skills should port over to SCO without much difficulty.

• Export compatibility and upgradability—Microsoft has announced publicly that policies built in OIS along with their data will be useable in SCO. There was a great deal of concern that SCO might be so radically different as to be incompatible and negate those investments customers have made in process automation. This will not be the case. Although it is not clear how much of the product’s internals will change, it is expected that the database structures will be upgraded significantly. Either way, there will be a path to get from OIS to SCO, which is not anticipated to be particularly difficult.

Unknowns

Here are several questions not yet answered in relation to the features of SCO:

• Integration Pack compatibility—Given that there are 30 IPs available today, it isn’t clear how many of those will work on SCO without modification. The anticipation is that if existing IPs are not fully compatible, Microsoft will upgrade the most popular ones as quickly as possible. An automation platform is only as useful as the products it can automate!

• Documentation detail improvement—Documentation is probably the most important deliverable for any software product. Whether for installation, troubleshooting, or general usage, you expect all the information to be available quickly and intuitively. The release of version 6.3 included the addition of OIS documentation to the TechNet Library for System Center (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff630946.aspx). It is likely this is just a first step in getting all documentation online. The current IP documentation includes only content for System Center IPs. Content specifics aside, continued improvement in documentation detail is expected.

• Quick Integration Kit (QIK) enhancement—The best way to extend the reach and power of OIS is by taking advantage of the SDK (QIK). Although current functionality is sufficient, enhancements could make it even better. Currently, there is no improvement roadmap or guidance on what changes might be necessary to enable QIK-based IPs to work in the upcoming version of the product. For the sake of all existing QIK-based IPs (some of which were created and shipped by Microsoft), expectations are that some framework enhancements are planned.

• Multi-tenant and remote Action Server support—The ability to support multiple customers or geographies with a centralized OIS deployment has been a longstanding customer request. Although techniques exist to implement this architecture today, there is only documented guidance and suggestions. There is no wizard or walkthrough to expand a current single-tenant OIS deployment into a multitenant or cross-geo implementation. Although how this functionality is actually introduced into SCO is still unknown, the capability is highly anticipated.

Understanding IT Process Automation

People who are new to OIS often are also new to ITPA. You might have also seen terms like Runbook Automation and Data Center Automation (DCA) used to describe OIS or tools offering similar services. The next sections discuss what these terms mean and what differentiates them.

A Brief History of IT Process Automation

Fundamentally, ITPA is any automated process operating within the context of a data center. ITPA focuses on activities in a data center, those that are within the purview of the IT department, similar to how a Business Process Automation (BPA) or Business Process Management (BPM) tool focuses on processes from the perspective of the business. In fact, OIS, with its rich UI, is often mistaken for a BPA or BPM tool. The tools look similar initially, but there are two major differences:

• OIS and other ITPA tools focus on processes that provide the underlying infrastructure to meet the business’s needs (such as server provisioning, incident management, or data refresh).

• BPA or BPM tools focus on processes that serve the direct needs of business units or other front office tasks (typically streamlining tasks performed by employees to maximize performance).

As these terms are not standardized, you might encounter situations where the two overlap, but generally the delineation is the divide between the front office and back office.

The Origins of ITPA

Sometime in the early 2000s, Opalis Software began enhancing its job scheduling engine and adding functionality to start jobs not only based on a schedule but also as a reaction to other events. The addition of an event-driven job scheduler marked the beginnings of the shift to RBA and ITPA.

The capability to trigger a simple job scheduling task sequence as a reaction to an external event meant automatic remediation of the situation causing the event might be possible. In the nascent stages of this approach, things were fairly simplistic. As an example, the application might monitor the Windows Event Log for specific messages and upon finding a matching message take some rudimentary corrective action like restarting a service or application, clearing log files, and so on.

This approach met with early success and was expanded to add additional sources of information. SNMP messages were an obvious choice to add because they were ubiquitous and provided a listener to a number of software packages with relative simplicity.

RBA was the first term used to describe this situation. Runbooks were still common at the time. Runbooks are the set of steps used to remediate problems in a data center. At one time, these were literally a bound set of instructions on how to address any conceivable error that might be encountered. These runbooks typically sat on a shelf in the computer room. RBA was concerned then with taking common errors and creating an automated set of tasks that would respond to them and either fully remediate those errors, or at least take most of the steps toward remediation. With this model, a new space would emerge several years later, where half a dozen small startups competed and ultimately were consumed by large software companies.

The final step in the creation of RBA from Opalis Software was the inclusion of monitors for specific monitoring applications such as Microsoft Operations Manager, NetIQ, HP OpenView Operations, and others. This meant that users would not need to rely on SNMP or errors as the lowest common denominator and could instead get their information directly from the monitoring tool. These add-ons were first seen in OpalisRobot, the forerunner of OIS.

As the idea of RBA grew, more companies adopted it. Each new installation found new challenges and saw the creation of new automated runbooks. Around this time, ITIL began to take a firm hold in the United States as its adoption was embraced even more strongly in the UK and Europe. The ripples caused by the sudden adoption of ITIL had a dramatic impact on RBA.

ITIL Gives Rise to ITPA

ITIL introduced a structured approach to data center management, one seen as a natural evolution of the industry. ITIL is a framework of best practices on how to handle situations within an IT organization. It provides an organizational framework, roles, and (in the latest versions) prescriptive advice on how to handle issues. ITIL separated incidents from problems and mandated tools to capture incidents, changes, assets, and even the relationships between them. These tools would increase the adoption of automation and give rise to ITPA.

Until this point, Opalis Software was largely alone in the space of runbook automation and focused most of its sales and engineering efforts on the runbook. In an ITIL world, Opalis Software was dedicated to the idea of incident resolution, but without much consideration given to incident management or the lifecycle of an event beyond the event monitoring system. The adoption of ITIL convinced the company to focus on the full lifecycle of an event rather than the simple resolution of that event, although that clearly was the critical aspect. Organizations began to want the automation to reach into their service desks and create a trouble ticket for the event, rather than simply solving it. The reach of automation extended into other silos as well.

CMDBs were also beginning to show their value and take hold. If you had a rich repository of data like a CMDB or even an asset manager, your automation could interrogate the repository and adjust the runbook as needed. It could also update the CMDB with information based on actions taken. Consider the value of having your system automatically check your CMDB when an alert is captured, to determine whether the affected asset was in a scheduled maintenance window:

• If the system were having maintenance performed, the alert could be safely resolved.

• If the system were not in maintenance but the outcome of the automated runbook would result in an outage, the CMDB and the event monitor could be updated to reflect this in a manner both human operators and systems could view.

Reaching Across the Data Center

Today these scenarios are the heart of what OIS does for customers. The terms ITPA and RBA (and to a lesser extent DCA) are now synonymous. Likewise, the idea of an automation platform that can integrate with any software component has become the norm. Events and incidents live in an ecosystem of tools, and to automate a process effectively, you must include all those tools in the process. It is not unusual to have a single automated process with service desks, event monitors, change management systems, configuration tools, virtualization tools, and more. The notion of providing a broad set of integration tools to use without coding or scripting is one pioneered by Opalis Software.

Process Is King

When discussing automation, companies are often asked whether they need to have a documented process to use OIS. Although not required, having a documented process greatly speeds the work of automation. You do however need to have a process. Oftentimes companies have processes, often fairly elaborate ones, but they are not properly documented. These processes live in the minds of the teams who are responsible; this is known as tribal knowledge. Whether in a formal document, a white board, a bar napkin, or only in someone’s head, if a process exists, an effort can be made to automate it. In the past, Opalis Software offered automation workshops to help companies capture these processes so they could automate. However, if a company has not matured to the stage where it has proper processes, be those formal or informal, no amount of automation will bring value.

Consider you have a process. What does that process look like? How did you come up with it? What considerations were given? What you should keep in mind when considering these questions is process is king. To illustrate this, consider one of your own processes. Did you design the process with your tools in mind, regardless if your tools could service every step?

Processes should be governed by their goals, not limited by the tools you own. If a tool does not provide a facility for a step desirable in the process, that normally becomes a manual step. This is how most organizations operate when designing process. The processes should provide step X at stage Y. If software package Z does not offer step X, the gap is manually dealt with, or occasionally the process is altered or deprecated.

You should not need to alter processes because of shortcomings in your tools or lack of connectivity between them. OIS is a great example of letting the software you have work together in a way that was previously difficult, if not impossible, without an ITPA tool.

Old Processes and Unwanted Artifacts

Having existing processes as you enter into the world of OIS is the most important prerequisite to effective IT process automation. However, you should consider the age of your processes. If more than two years old, revisit the logic for performing each step. (This is actually a good idea for any process). The review will limit the number of compromises and exceptions introduced into the new process. Often the reasons for compromise are no longer valid, or can be overcome using current tools.

To illustrate, consider a nontechnical situation where a child is learning to cook a roast with her father. The father cuts off a full inch of the end of the roast before cooking it. The child asks why the portion of meat was removed. The father concedes he does not know why; it is how he was taught. As the child is unsatisfied with that answer and demands a better explanation, the father calls his mother to see why she cuts the end off the roast. The grandmother admits this is how it was always done. The child remains unmoved by this illogical explanation. Upon discussion, neither the father or grandmother has the answer, but they know the great-grandmother also prepares her roasts this way. When they question the elderly great-grandmother, she denies cutting a section of the roast off and wasting it. This upsets the grandmother as she followed her mother’s process perfectly. After much debate and discussion, the grandmother recalls the exact date she wrote down the recipe, which causes the great-grandmother to pause. She concedes she cut the end of a roast—once. The day a neighbor borrowed the big pan and the roast would not fit in the small pan; the very day the recipe was recorded.

In this case, the process was captured while including a wasteful exception; that exception then became the standard practice for decades to come. Data centers are no different. This type of transmission of processes occurs regularly. After the people who designed the original process leave, the process is cemented and no longer reviewed properly. As you look at your own environment, be as curious as the child in the story; persist until you find the real reason the process exists in its current form. Question every step and prove each is necessary.

Not a Job Scheduler

When first exposed to OIS, IT administrators often wonder if it is still a job scheduler. This is not the case. While OIS can schedule policies, it is by no means an enterprise job scheduler. Enterprise job schedulers do not see the world in the ITPA view. They expect to trigger at certain times, not as a reaction to events, and are not designed to operate with other management tools in your data canter. Products in this category typically can run thousands of jobs at a time and provide special views to help administrators see into what’s running in the next 5 minutes, 24 hours, or next week. One cannot imagine such a view in OIS. When would the next change request be logged? When would it be approved? When would the event monitor capture the next critical alert?

However, OIS would be an excellent tool to manage job schedulers; toward that end, OIS 6.2.2 ships with an IP for CA Autosys.

An ITPA Tool, Not a Connector

People tend to mistake OIS for a connector. This is understandable as OIS often competes with connector software. Connectors provide point solutions between two pieces of software and generally offer a dumb pipe between them. As an example, consider a point connector that takes alerts from an event management console and creates a corresponding incident in a trouble ticketing system. These tickets are created for every alert, and the connector cannot help with remediation or triage the event. You can use OIS to mimic the behavior of a connector, but doing so sells the value of the tool short. Moreover, as OIS is not designed for this approach, you would have to implement special policy structures to handle surges in throughput. Using an ITPA tool as a connector is not recommended—square pegs fit best into square holes.

Summary

As Microsoft’s automation platform, OIS brings automation, orchestration, and integration to the data center. Enabling ITPA, it supplements the existing power of the System Center suite with end-to-end data center management. This enables your IT organization to quickly realize all the benefits of a heterogeneous, scalable, flexible, and dynamic infrastructure. For those taking the journey past the dynamic data center and to the cloud, public or private, System Center with OIS can supercharge your ride.

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