When to select SC Orchestrator over vCenter Orchestrator

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I got a question from a customer why they should choose System Center Orchestrator instead of vCenter Orchestrator.

Both products work in the automation field and can do quite much, as they both are extendable and you can develop add-ons, the possibilities are almost endless!

In the case of the System Center Orchestrator, it is included in the System Center suite so if you already use some of the components  and have the licenses in place then you can start automating a lot more.

In the case of vCenter Orchestrator, it is included in the vCenter license that you buy in your vSphere suite.

Both orchestrators are very easy to start working with as they are gui based. the vCenter Orchestrator integrates into the vSphere client and from there you can easily start the wanted workflow. With both you can create workflows/runbooks and let users connect to a web console to kick of the action.

Example of a runbook from SCO

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Example of a workflow from vCO

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In both there are possibilities to automate for example Active Directory and users. Onboarding processes when new employees start is an example of an process that often involves quite some manual intervention and benefits from automation. Giving end users and system owners the possibility to create and manage their own virtual machines through a web portal is another example that would offload the IT departments technicians busy day. The list of examples goes on and on…

System Center Orchestrator Architectural overview:

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vCenter Orchestrator Architectural overview:

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Comparison table:

SCO VCO
Licensing License required only for endpoints being managed.
No additional System Center licenses are needed for management servers or SQL Server technology.		 vCenter standard license, no extra cost
Web console Yes Yes
Third Party Plugin/IP Yes Yes
Custom Plugin/IP development Yes Yes
Manage VMware vSphere Yes Yes
Manage System Center Yes No (not out of the box,requires quite a bit of customization)
Workflow/Runbook templates No Yes
Import/Export Workflow/Runbooks Yes Yes

 Conclusion

 So what orchestrator should you go with? Well it depends of course and here is my opinions,

If you have a VMware environment but run mostly Windows Servers and Microsoft applications and already have one or more System Center roles deployed the favor is in the SCO hand as SCO integrates so well with the Microsoft software using the supported Integration Packs and you also can with the VMware IP manage the vSphere environment. The rich amount of activities that the Integration Packs consists of makes it easy to start automating and quickly expand the scope and get some serious automation results in the whole stack! The SCO community helps you a lot when creating runbooks and that with the possibility to import a whole set of runbooks from other IT Pro´s can get your automation goal to be achieved quickly.

If you have a VMware environment and do not use any System Center roles and also have a more diverse load of VM´s with different operating systems, but still want to start automating your environment I would recommend the vCO. One big advantage that the vCO has is that it comes with a wide range of workflows already created and ready to be customized which helps you in the speed to automate.

From a licensing perspective it should be noted that as described in the table, you must have a System Center license on every physical device you plan to automate with System Center Orchestrator. On the virtualization hosts you would use the Windows Datacenter and System Center Datacenter licenses that gives you unlimited VM´s that you can manage. On single physical hosts you must use a System Center Standard license, but as I said above, if you already have another System Center Role you probably have the licensing in place :-). vCenter Orchestrator comes with the vCenter license and there is no extra licensing cost for managing single hosts or Active Directory.

SC Orchestrator 2012 Sp1 and VMware vSphere 5.1

I have been exploring the System Center Orchestrator Integration Pack for vSphere and this is some good stuff! I have several customers that have bought Windows Datacenter Licenses with the System Center bundle and that is quite beneficial from a economical perspective! This means that they can use the System Center all parts with all VM´s and hosts. Several customers also use VMware vSphere as their virtualization platform and they can use System Center Orchestrator to build automation without any extra license cost.

In the System Center family there is only Virtual Machine Manager and Orchestrator that has connections to VMware vSphere without third party software (In Operations Manager you can use SNMP to get alarms from vCenter though).

So what can we do with Orchestrator IP for vSphere? This is the activities that is in the pack with version number 7.1.3010:

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And what do we need to configure, well of course we need connection settings to a vCenter server and that is found under the “Options” and then you add your vCenter or if you have several and want to use them you will have to add one configuration for each.

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And here is an simple example of a runbook that changes all VM´s memory to 384 MB, in the runbook I check if the VM is on or off and do an graceful power off activity depending on that status. For each activity in the runbook we have to add what configured vCenter we want to use or the runbook will fail!

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The possibilites are almost endles as you can combine these activitiy with the others and interact with for example SCCM and deploy VM´s and OS. If this list of activities in the IP is not enough it can be extended by either creating your own IP or calling PowerCLI scripts from your runbook. Together with System Center Service Manager we can build nice self service portals that also does stuff on the VMware VM´s based on what the user order.