Last Update: Sep 04, 2024 | Published: Sep 12, 2013
In a previous post I gave an overview of EUPSCO, short for End User Portal for System Center Orchestrator, a free web application that helps publish and launch runbooks. So without further ado, let’s get our hands dirty and deploy this amazing free tool! Today I’ll be talking about System Center 2012 SP1 – Orchestrator and installing EUPSCO.
Prior to actually installing the application, we have some of the regular prerequisites work to complete. This is extremely important for this specific utility, as there is essentially no installer and we have to do all the work manually. But fear not, it’s all pretty simple. For the purpose of demonstration, I am going to use a new server to host the application and leverage our existing SQL database server, which is already being utilized by our Orchestrator installation. You are welcome to choose a different SQL server, instance, or even deploy a dedicated install.
To begin the installation, start with a standard installation of Windows Server 2012 and add to it the features for .NET 4.5 Framework, which this application is written to use, and IIS for hosting the application. To keep this simple, the following PowerShell commands will deploy these requirements:
Import-Module ServerManager Add-WindowsFeature Web-Default-Doc, Web-Dir-Browsing, Web-Http-Errors, Web-Static-Content, Web-Http-Redirect, Web-Http-Logging, Web-Stat-Compression, Web-Dyn-Compression, Web-Basic-Auth, Web-Digest-Auth, Web-Windows-Auth, Web-Net-Ext45, Web-ASP-Net45, Web-ISAPI-Ext, Web-ISAPI-Filter, Web-Mgmt-Console
As the application is delivered as a web app, we require an account that the application pool will impersonate while it is running. This account also requires an additional level of trust as it will communicate with both our Orchestrator ODATA website and a SQL database, on which the application will store its configuration details.
On your Active Directory, proceed to create a new AD user account. Give this a name and login details that adhere to your naming conventions and standards; for example, I am going to use the account name !svcEUPSCO and a strong password. Depending on your security policies, you may want to consider setting this password to never expire.
To delegate our service account administrative access to Orchestrator, you will need to add this user account as a member of the group you defined as the Group for Orchestrator Administrators during its installation. Depending on the options you selected, this might have been a default local computer group – or, preferably, you will have created a domain group for this task.
Rather than deploy a new SQL server, or SQL instance, I will simply create a new database on the SQL server instance that is already utilized for the Orchestrator database store.
Next we get to the exciting part of the installation. If you have not already downloaded your copy of EUPSCO from the developer’s site, then it is time that you do so!
The package is delivered as a simple ZIP file from the site, which we just need to extract to our web server. To begin with, I have the content extracted to C:EUPSCO_201307221. On a default installation a new empty website will be automatically created; however, as you might choose to deploy this portal to a server that hosts additional sites, I will also create a new site for this web application.
At this point we should now have all the web application configurations complete. All that remains is for us to set the configuration of the applications settings to connect with our Active Directory for authentication, point to our Orchestrator ODATA REST Web Services URL, and connect to our database for EUPSCO configuration details.
In the application folder, we should have a file called web.config, which contains the configuration for our web application.
Active Directory – Start by searching for the entry key=”DomainSearchRoot” and set this to match your active directory domain. In my example this is diginerve.net, which I will write in LDAP format as “DC=diginerve,DC=net”.
SCO Web Service – To configure the web service, search the file for key=”OrchestratorServiceURL” and set the value to match the URL of your Orchestrator Service. For example this might read as HTTP://PDC-SC-OR01.diginerve.net:81/Orchestrator2012/orchestrator.svc.
Database Server – To configure the database details, search the file for name=”Database” and in the connectionString we need to apply two settings, first the Data Source to the name of the database server, and second to the Initial Catalog to the name of the database we created on the server. Again, for example my settings read as Data Source=PDC-DB-SQL01.diginerve.net;Initial Catalog=EUPSCO;
Take a deep breath and put a big smile on your face – you have just completed the installation! Now it’s time to check that everything has worked by launching your web browser and surfing to the website with the settings you configured for the site. As the site is not listed in your Trusted Sites list, you will need to authenticate to the site. In the configuration file, by default the domain administrator is also the administrator account for the portal. (You can change this by editing the value for key=”AdminUserIds” in the web.config file.)
Once authenticated, the site will take a few moments to load the first time, as IIS compiles the ASP.NET code.
Have fun getting acquainted!