Table of Contents

1Introduction

1.1Purpose

1.2Audience

2Solution

2.1Business Scenario Addressed

2.2Key Technical Tasks

2.3Engagement Process Flow

3Assumptions

4Best Practices

4.1Understand Business Requirements

4.2Communication Planning

5Consultant Experience Requirements

6Datacenter Automation Offering Structure

6.1Prescriptive and Reference Guides

6.2Pre-Engagement

7Engagement Phases

7.1Datacenter Automation Assessment Workshop

7.1.1Prerequisites

7.1.2Activities

7.1.3Deliverables

7.2Datacenter Automation Jumpstart

7.2.1Prerequisites

7.2.2Activities

7.2.3Deliverables

8References

Tables

Table 3: Consultant Experience Requirements

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1Introduction

1.1Purpose

This document provides information on the delivery of the Datacenter Automation Offering. The offering should automate an IT process that’s important to the customer and really shows the value of Datacenter Automation and Orchestrator in a very short amount of time.It should provide a hook to the customer by showing the power of our technology and discuss further scenarios and opportunities after jumpstart is deployed. Specifically, it provides guidance on how to manage a successful engagement and producing key <Partner namedeliverables, including, but not limited to:

Envision / Plan / Develop / Stabilize / Deploy
Vision and scope / Architecture and Solution design template / Test and Deploy specifications / Change request form / Close-out presentation
Datacenter Automation Assessment Workshop / Deployment and test plan / Runbook Functional Specifications Document / Solution release checklist / Weekly status reports
Engagement kick-off presentation / Functional specification and detailed design guide / Onsite Knowledge Transfer / Informal Training / Quality assurance checklist

1.2Audience

This document is designed to assist the engagement manager (s) and consultant(s) responsible for delivering this Offering. Assistance with pre-sales and engagement planning can be found in the guides which are part of this offering.

2Solution

2.1Business Scenario Addressed

This offering was developed to provide a structured method for helping customers provide IT Optimization through the use of automation. Typical customers will have identified a need to streamline IT operations and processes, reduce the burden on IT resources and improve their ability to meet the complex needs of the businesses that they support. They can accomplish this by automating time-consuming manual processes, a method used to keep the world’s largest and most efficient datacenter facilities operating with minimal manual oversight.

The role of the consultant in this engagement is to provide a subject matter expert’s perspective on the customer’s goals and to identify the systems or technologies in their environment that are the ideal candidates for incorporating into this engagement. Once these focus areas are identified, the consultant is also responsible for analyzing the customer’s data center infrastructure, management, processes, and identifying opportunities for automation.

2.2Key Technical Tasks

Assessment

  • High Level Overview of System Center 2012 - Orchestrator capabilities
  • Demo of sample automation scenarios
  • Review and assessment of customer current state and automation scenarios
  • Identify any follow-on work.

Jumpstart

  • Pre-engagement Activities:
  • Clear guidance on Jumpstart Deliverables
  • SOW must be TQA’d to ensure valid scope
  • Engagement Includes:
  • 1 Week Assessment
  • 2 Weeks Design, Implementation and Testing
  • 1 Week Knowledge transfer and informal training

2.3Engagement Process Flow

3Assumptions

The Datacenter Automation offering is designed to build on top of existing data center infrastructure and management solutions. These can be Microsoft and third-party technologies and solutions. The assumption is that the customer is looking to streamline IT operations and processes, reduce the burden on IT resources, and improve their ability to meet the complex needs of the businesses that they support.

The consultant(s) engaged should meet or exceed the experience the knowledge requirements as noted in Section 5. Consultant Experience Requirements of this document. In addition, the consultant should have reviewed the following:

  • Datacenter Services Automation Framework
  • Available Runbooks in Datacenter Services Automation Library

4Best Practices

4.1Understand Business Requirements

A large percentage of integration engagements fail, as consultant(s) focus purely on technical aspects of Solution and often ignore the business challenges that the customer is trying to overcome by achieving the integration. AnInfrastructure Development consultant should be part of project team to validate that the integration engagement would address specific business requirements. In addition, Infrastructure Development consultants should also have a deep understanding of the customer’s technical environment. If possible, make sure the customer is committed to provide resources who understand both their business and technical environment sufficiently to work closely to define business requirements.

4.2Communication Planning

As in any other IT engagement, communication is important to the overall engagement’s success. Communication planning determines the information and communications needs of the stakeholders. The project/engagement manager and team should understand that it is extremely important to communicate in a timely manner within the team as well as with the customer. It is paramount to validate prior to the delivery of this workshop that the appropriate audience and expectations are aligned. The project/engagement manager should validate this through a pre-onsite call with both the consultant(s) and the customer.

5Consultant Experience Requirements

The following table describes theprimary skillset: the technical skills for infrastructure development consultants to deliver a Datacenter Automation Assessment workshop. While all these skills are not necessarily leveraged during the assessment engagement, it is important to understand these concepts when scoping the estimation of effort required to develop runbooks based on customer requirements.

Table 3: Consultant Experience Requirements

Role / Consultant Experience Requirements
Infrastructure Development consultants / System Center 2012 SP1 - Orchestrator
  • Strong knowledge of Orchestrator Architecture and Deployment including multi-datacenter design or Azure integration
  • Strong knowledge of Microsoft developed Integration Packs as well as standard activities
Runbook Design
  • Advanced knowledge of PowerShell scripting
  • Demonstrated success in development of complex runbooks which include:
  • Integration Points (Web Services, Integration Packs, DB, Files)
  • SQL Query Execution (for updates/inserts/deletes as well as Selects)
  • CLI Execution (both windows and non-windows)
  • Interfaces such as such as SNMP, WMI, SSH
  • CLI Execution (both windows and non-windows)
  • Multi-Value Data handling (flattening, etc.)
  • Branches, Joins, Junctions, Truncating
  • Leveraging Variables (as well as storage of variables)
  • Types of Links (complex link logic, if/then, case, AND/OR, etc.)
  • Necessity for Data Manipulation/Parsing (Mid, Field Function, etc.)
  • Necessity for Loops (retries for error or otherwise)
  • Usage of Published Data (everything should be as dynamic as possible)
  • Necessity of a runbook to be restartable and/or haltable
  • Necessity to store state (and how that will be done – basically, External Data persistence)
  • Runbook Nesting
  • Error Handling
  • Necessity for Data Mapping (case statement, Map Published Data, etc.)
  • Parallelism requirements

6Datacenter Automation Offering Structure

6.1Prescriptive and Reference Guides

This document contains consultant guidance for the engagement. Supplemental documentation, including questionnaires and document templates, can be found below. You are encouraged to use these templates as a baseline for the Offering deliverables during the engagement.

6.2Pre-Engagement

The pre-engagement process is critical to verify that both the client and <Partner name>have aligned expectations for the Datacenter Automation Offering.

The client should be amenable to providing a project/engagement manager to oversee the engagement and help escalate resolutions to any problems that occur. Timelines and work schedules should be discussed during this period to ensure the appropriate resources as well as environment (e.g. Classroom or meeting room with projector and whiteboard)

7Engagement Phases

7.1Datacenter Automation Assessment Workshop

1

2

3

4

5

5.1

7.1.1Prerequisites

  • Links to the system requirements for each of the Orchestrator components are provided below:
  • System Requirements: Management Server
  • System Requirements: Runbook Server
  • System Requirements: Orchestrator Web Service
  • System Requirements: Runbook Designer
  • Consultant should select sample scenarios from the Datacenter Automation Library
  • The statement of work provides guidelines for the engagement and should be reviewed in detail prior to the kick-off meeting.
  • The customer kick-off presentation provides a template for the engagement kick-off meeting structure.
  • The project plan (WBS) provides the consultant and customer with a milestone-based schedule for the engagement.
  • The assessment questionnaire provides a means for gathering information from the customer before the kick-off meeting.

Prior to the kick-off meeting, the customer should have completed the assessment questionnaire. While the customer may not be able to answer all of the questions to the fullest extent, this document is critical for obtaining the necessary technical details required to move forward with the Solution design. When the customer has completed the questionnaire, the kick-off meeting can be scheduled. The kick-off meeting provides the opportunity to officially start the engagement and gather the information necessary to complete the vision and scope document and begin planning for the next step engagement phase for a Datacenter Automation Jumpstart.

7.1.2Activities

Prior to being onsite with the customer for the workshop, the consultant should have reviewed the answered questionnaire provided by the customer to tailor any discussion points in the Datacenter Automation Assessment Deck. The provided deck should be used to lead the customer through a specific agenda and slides should be updated to include the customer’s pain points relative to the discussion. This agenda will include:

  • High Level Overview of System Center 2012 SP1 – Orchestrator Capabilities
  • Demo of Sample Automation Scenarios
  • Review and Assessment of current state and automation scenarios
  • Deliverables
  • Assessment Report
  • Vision and Scope*
  • Design Architecture*
  • Statement of Work*
  • Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)*

*Optional unless the customer wishes to move forward with the Datacenter Jumpstart Engagement

If the customer wishes to move forward with the Jumpstart offering following the workshop, a draft of the vision and scope document should be completed and presented to the client at the end of the engagement. When the vision and scope draft is presented, the customer needs to review it and sign off on the document.

Frequently, this phase of the engagement life cycle is ignored or minimized. However, experience shows that the quality of the tasks performed in this phase contributes significantly to customer satisfaction with the deliverables and to leads to a positive, long-term client relationship. Tasks in this phase also help to prevent uncontrolled changes in scope in the Jumpstart phase of the engagement, which can ultimately increase the engagement timeline.

7.2Datacenter Automation Jumpstart

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7.2

7.3

7.2.1Prerequisites

  • The statement of work provides guidelines for the engagement and should be reviewed in detail prior to the kick-off meeting.
  • The customer kick-off presentation provides a template for the engagement kick-off meeting structure.
  • The project plan (WBS) provides the consultant and customer with a milestone-based schedule for the engagement.
  • The assessment questionnaire provides a means for gathering information from the customer before the kick-off meeting.
  • Links to the system requirements for each of the Orchestrator components are provided below:
  • System Requirements: Management Server
  • System Requirements: Runbook Server
  • System Requirements: Orchestrator Web Service
  • System Requirements: Runbook Designer

If a Datacenter Automation Assessment Workshop has not been previously performed, the customer complete the assessment questionnaire prior to the kick-off meeting. While the customer may not be able to answer all of the questions to the fullest extent, this document is critical for obtaining the necessary technical details required to move forward with the Solution design. When the customer has completed the questionnaire, the kick-off meeting can be scheduled. The kick-off meeting provides the opportunity to officially start the engagement, review the vision and scope as well as the output of the assessment report and validate that the customer has the people, software and infrastructure resources in place prior to the consultant arriving onsite.

7.2.2Activities

If an assessment workshop was performed as a precursor to this phase of the engagement, the consultant should review the assessment prior to arriving onsite. While onsite, the consultant will work with the customer to:

  • Deploy pre-defined Automation Infrastructure consisting of System Center 2012 SP1 – Orchestrator with the appropriate Integration Packs.
  • Creation of runbooks to support 2 Standard or 1 Complex Microsoft technology-based automation scenario(s) deployed into production. The “EngagementManagerGuide” talks about the different types of scenarios and helps on how to scope them by providing some aspects that impacts the implementation efforts and duration. It also provides some examples for “Standard” and “Complex”.
  • Knowledge transfer of both the deployed automation infrastructure as well as the design and functionality of the runbook(s).
  • Deliverables
  • Runbook Functional Specifications Document
  • Orchestrator Architecture Design Document
  • Orchestrator runbooks

*Optional if assessment completed previously

If the customer did not have a previous Datacenter Automation Assessment Workshop, a draft of the vision and scope document should be completed and presented to the client immediately. When the vision and scope draft is presented, the customer needs to review it and sign off on the document.

Frequently, this phase of the engagement life cycle is ignored or minimized. However, experience shows that the quality of the tasks performed in this phase contributes significantly to customer satisfaction with the deliverables and to leads to a positive, long-term client relationship. Tasks in this phase also help to prevent uncontrolled changes in scope in the Jumpstart phase of the engagement, which can ultimately increase the engagement timeline.

8References

Below are items which can be leveraged to support this engagement.

Site Name / Internet Address
Orchestrator Video Recordings /
System Center: Designing Orchestrator Runbooks /
Orchestrator Engineering Blog /

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