At the annual Microsoft Management Summit, in March this year Microsoft announced that Opalis, which Microsoft acquired in December 2009, would be renamed to System Center Orchestrator.
System Center Orchestrator (SCO) is Run Book Automation (RBA) software, which can be used to define, build, orchestrate, manage and report on workflows. The workflows are defined in the SCO workflow designer, and so called Integration Packs are provided to interact with Microsoft and non-Microsoft products, which run on so called Action Servers.
This week Microsoft released details about what to expect in the upcoming Beta version of System Center Orchestrator 2012, expected to arrive in June. First of all Microsoft has integrated the Opalis code into the Microsoft codebase, and will now be aligned with Microsofts Common Engineering Criteria.
Some of the expected features are:
- Server components will only run on Windows Server 2008 R2
- The client components will only run on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit)
- Datastore will ony be supported on top of SQL 2008 R2, support for Oracle DB will be dropped
- The RTM version will contain integration packs for all the new System Center products which are expected to be released during Microsoft’s 2012 fiscal year
- The Beta will include new integration packs for: Active Directory, FTP, VMware vSphere and IBM Tivoli Netcool Omnibus.
- The Console will be based on Silverlight and Internet Information Services (IIS)
- New installer to replace the JBOSS and Java installers
- The RTM Version will contain a PowerShell provider
- Some Legacy Activities are removed
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