System Center Opalis 6.3 Released

Opalis 6.3 has just been posted over on the System Center Opalis website. http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/opalis.aspx

System Center Opalis allows you create automated workflows to integrate all aspects of System Center (and beyond). For example, you could configure an Opalis workflow to be triggered by an Ops Manager alert that indicates that disk space is running out on an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox server. The workflow could then remediate this disk space issue by spinning up and deploying a new mailbox server by leveraging Virtual Machine Manager. Once the new mailbox server is deployed, the Opalis workflow could then trigger Exchange to move half the mailboxes off the original mailbox server to the newly deployed one. These tasks, performed in the correct sequence, would utomatically resolve the disk space alert in Ops Mgr that triggered the workflow in the first place.

Opalis workflows leverage special Integration Packs (IPs) to allow you to build a sequence of tasks. IPs exist for a large number of products and Microsoft's System Center team is working hard to create IPs that allow Opalis workflows to leverage all aspects of each System Center product's functionality. In the example above, you'd use the Ops Mgr IP to configure the workflow to watch for the alert about mailbox server disk space, the Virtual Machine Manager IP to configure the workflow to spin up an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox server virtual machine template, and so on. 

Although you could do this through extensive scripting, the Opalis workflow builder allows you to dragtasks sequentially together in the same way that you might build a diagram in Visio. This visual approach vastly simplifies the process of creating an automated workflow and makes it easy to get everything working properly.

 lot of administrators shy away from complex scripting because they end up spending far more time building the automated process than they would save by using it. With Opalis, building complex structured workflows is straight forward and intuitive (something that scripting is often not) Extensive integration with other parts of the System Center suite mean that Opalis is likely to be as important to administrators in the coming years as SCCM and Ops Mgr are today.