Book excerpt: Over 30 recipes to automate your mission-critical tasks using the new and powerful Microsoft System Center 2016 Orchestrator About This Book Create powerful runbooks for the entire System Center 2016 product line Explore System Center 2016 Orchestrator to manage and automate your datacenter A recipe-based guide to using SCO efficiently Who This Book Is For If you are a system administrator and want to simplify the process of automating system administration tasks using System Center Orchestrator 2016 then this book is for you. A basic knowledge of SCO is expected What You Will Learn Create Runbooks for IT Service Management processes Design and create Runbooks for System Center Confguration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager Set up System Center Orchestrator, making it highly available Create branching, looping, and child Runbooks to completely master System Center 2016 Orchestrator Implement a security model for your System Center Orchestrator deployment and to execute Runbooks Manage and automate your Datacenter with powerful Runbooks Automate your System Center environment In Detail With Microsoft System Center 2016 Orchestrator Cookbook, you will start by learning how to efficiently install and secure System Center Orchestrator. You will then learn how you can create configuration files for SCO 2016. After initial installation and configuration, you will soon be planning and creating functional and fault-tolerant System Center runbooks to automate daily tasks and routine operations. Next you will delve into runbooks; you will learn how to create powerful and advanced runbooks such as Building your Runbook without a Dead End. You will also learn to create simple and advanced runbooks for your daily tasks. Towards the end of the book, you will learn to use SCO for other interesting tasks and also learn to maintain and perform SCO health checks. By the end of the book, you will be able to automate your administrative tasks successfully with SCO. Style and approach This book is written in a practical, cookbook style with numerous chapters and recipes focusing on creating runbooks to automate mission-critical and everyday administration tasks.