Using EMC ESI Microsoft Orchestrator Integration Pack to automate the creation of recover point protected cluster shared volumes

EMC´s ESI provides an Integration Pack(IP) for Microsoft´s System Center Orchestrator.

Orchestrator itself allows you to Automate repeating Tasks (Services ) in your Datacenter.

The Idea of Integration Packs is to avoid Massive Skripting and provide drag and Drop Functionalities for common activities.

 

The Acticities get linked together and composed as a Runbook.
Here is a view of a typical runbook made of Activities from EMC´s ESI Integration Pack:

 

Runbook.png

 

Beside of Custom IP´s built buy Vendors like EMC, Orchestrator itself provides a rich set of Activities to work with other Systems, Web Servers, Shells like SSH and of Course Powershell.

Since there is also a Trend from Microsoft to move towards Powershell Automation, it is a good Idea to write Custom Activities in Powershell.

EMC provides rich Powershell Integration for their main Systems like Recoverpoint.

Here is a Custom Activity Example for creating a Recoverpoint Consistency Group with Powershell:

CreateCG.png

 

As a best Practice, keep Custom activities in small Runbooks ( or create your own activities with the Orchestrator Integration Kit ) for Maximum of Flexibility and Re-Usage.

Those Runbooks than can be put together in a Master runbook:

 

MasterRunbook.png

 

You can see that there are also Standard Activities like Sending email´s.

 

I Put together a Small Example of how this links together.

In the Example, a request For a new Cluster Shared Volume cretes a new Lun on a Primary Array, Maps it to the Cluster and adds it to the Cluster Shared Volumes. Than a RecoverPoint Consistency Group is created, the LUN is added to the replication Set and the remote copy gets provisioned.

After the Copy is Enabled, an email gets sent to the requestor containing Information like the Volume Name and the Name of the CSV in the Cluster.

You can see the Runbook in Action  in this 3 Minute Video:

 

 

Want to TestDrive ESI and Orchestrator ? Come to EMC World and grab a Hand on the VLABs !