During the Tech Preview of Workflow Studio, the most popular posts I had were around using Workflow Studio to create a green data center:

• Green Data Center - Support for Wake On LANhttp://community.citrix.com/x/RQUgAg

• Green Data Center - Getting the power back on
  http://community.citrix.com/x/AQUgAg

• Green Data Center - Shutting Down a Windows Server
  http://community.citrix.com/x/9IUNAg

• Green Data Center - Shutting Down a XenServer Host
  http://community.citrix.com/x/1IAVAg

I wanted to review these very popular posts and talk about how the most recent versions of Workflow Studio can be leveraged for these tasks.

Wake On LAN
Support for WakeOnLAN was included in the activity library pack made available in April with version 1.1. The WakeOnLAN activity is in the 'Networking' library and in the 'Networking' folder in the Designer once installed:

Shutting Down a Windows Server
In the Tech Preview post, I talked about two methods of shutting down a computer. One of those two methods - LaunchProcess - is available as part of the library pack that was released in April (under Windows), but also in that pack is a Shutdown activity that manages this for you. The Shutdown Windows activity is in the Networking library with Wake On LAN.

Shutting Down a XenServer host
In the Tech Preview post, I talked about several activities for interfacing with XenServer VMs and the XenServer host. These activities are all part of the library pack from April. These activities are in the 'Citrix XenServer' library and in the 'Citrix XenServer' folder in the Designer once installed:

The host activities Disable-Host and Shutdown-Host that were in the Tech Preview post are not available yet, but will be in the next update to this library.

If you are using Workflow Studio to manage power in your environment, drop me a line and let me know how it is going. If you aren't using it, let me know what we can do to make it easier for you.

In a previous post I covered how to integrate Wake On LAN into your workflow, but how many people are currently using Wake On LAN or at least know that the majority of their servers support it?

Do the servers in your Data Center support Wake On LAN technology?	Choose
Yes, and I currently use it
Yes, I believe so but I am not using it
No, they only support the hardware vendor's proprietary technology
No, they do not support any form of remote power management
I have no Idea

In previous posts I have explored using Workflow Studio to Shut down a Windows host and also how to Shut down a XenServer host. Getting the power off is a big step in being greener, but if you could just turn off machines and leave them off permanently then you wouldn't need Workflow Studio Next we have to look at how to get those hosts powered back on.

There are a lot of different options out there for power management, but the one thing that is fairly consistently avaiable is Wake On LAN (WOL). In this post I am going to look at how WOL technology can be leveraged by Workflow Studio. Most modern server NICs have some form of WOL support (though you may have to turn it on in the BIOS.) This allows you to start up any machine that you know the MAC address for. Heare are some details on WOL from Intel and the Wikipedia WOL page has a good overview and a lot of links to free utilities and sample code.

Now that we have an understanding of how we want to start our server we can add it in as a task in Workflow Studio. There isn't a native WOL task in Workflow Studio (not yet anyway), but it is pretty easy to call one of the tools mentioned in the Wikipedia article with a "Launch Process" task. I started with that, but didn't like having to require one of these to be installed, so I went looking at the code samples. I finally found a great implementation of WOL in PowerShell by /\/\o\/\/ The PowerShell Guy. Paste that code in a PowerShell Script task and you have an embedded Wake On LAN task.

The next step is to put all this together into a single workflow with some business logic about when you want to start and stop your servers. I want to hear from you - what metrics would you want to use to drive a "Green" workflow? Is Wake On LAN supported in your data center? What issues do you have that this kind of a workflow could help with?

In a previous post (Shutting Down a Windows Server) I looked at how you can shutdown Windows Servers in a workflow to save power. If you have already moved your workloads to a XenServer environment this task becomes a lot easier to manage. Shutting down a XenServer host is a three-step process:

1. Suspend or Shutdown any VMs that you have running on the host (with either Suspend-VM or Shutdown-VM)
2. Disable the host so new VMs cannot be started (with Disable-Host)
3. Shutdown the host (with Shutdown-Host)

To turn this process into a complete workflow we need to define the logic that determines which hosts to shutdown and what to do with the VMs running on it. For simplicity sake I have chosen to shutdown all the hosts on my server (or in my Pool if a master server is specified) and to first suspend all the VMs currently running on the host(s). Here is what the workflow looks like:

I added in the prompts so that if you download this workflow and run it you are reminded to specify your own XenServer host name, user, and password, but in reality these items would most likely be hard-coded or specified at run time dynamically. Next we are going to have to look into starting Windows Servers and XenServer hosts back up as my server room is a long walk for me.

If you want to download the workflow to try in your environment I posted it to the Script Exchange where you can also post workflows you have built. Click here to download the workflow file.

In a previous post about use cases for IT Process Automation and Workflow Studio I mentioned building a workflow to facilitate a "Green Data Center". Workflow Studio can help with this by managing the workloads on your servers and turning servers off when they are not needed. In this post I will show you 2 ways that you can shutdown a windows server from a workflow (these are native to Windows, if you are using 3rd party tools let me know in the comments.)

1. "Launch Process" Task - Windows has a built-in utility (shutdown.exe) that can shutdown computers on your network remotely. Using the Workflow Studio "Launch Process" task allows you to call the shutdown command and pass it the arguments you want for your needs. You can see all the arguments by typing "shutdown /?" at your command line and there are several detailed write-ups on Microsoft's site (here and here for example).
2. "PowerShell Script" Task - WMI has a class (Win32_OperatingSystem) that can be used to shutdown computers as well. Workflow Studio has a task called "Get WMI Info" that is designed to query WMI classes, but unfortunately it cannot call methods on the WMI classes. We will need to leverage a scripting environment like PowerShell to be able to call the method (or you could use VBScript.) Fortunately, in PowerShell we only need one line of code to achieve this:

(Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem -ComputerName <computer name>).shutdown()

Add that line of code to your "PowerShell Script" task and replace the <computer name> with the name of the computer you would like to shutdown.

In this post I looked at shutting down a Windows Server, but in future posts I will expand this and look at how to use Wake On LAN to power machines back on, how you can manage power on a XenServer host machine, and how you can integrate this with logic to monitor when to shut down and start up your servers.
 
Power management is an area that we are working diligently on internally to build out a robust set of tasks for you. Have you tried automating server shutdown processes in your data center? What issues do you face? What kinds of inputs do you want to be able to leverage to determine when to shutdown a server?

The first question that most people ask me after seeing Workflow Studio in action is:

"Wow! That's cool, but what can I do with that?

I would like to use this post to try to explain why I think you should be doing automation in your data center today and then look at some different processes that are good candidates for automation with Workflow Studio.

Why should you automate?
The IT data center of today often includes products from many different vendors and consists of both hardware devices and software. Often, the SDKs that are available for all of these devices and software are quite inconsistent and some of your processes may have been developed by a consultant who is no longer around. Stop and ask yourself this question:

Are all of my processes consistently repeatable by anyone on the team?

If you can't answer 'yes' to that question then you should be looking into IT Process Automation. And if you want an easy way to automate tasks across multiple products/components without the need for complex scripting, then take a look at Workflow Studio.

Here are some broad categories for types of automation you might want to have in your data center:

1. On-Demand Automation - Being able to launch a process that combines several tasks, possibly with some simple user input, in response to something that has happened in your environment (e.g. A call or email comes in that a new user needs to be setup, a new application installed, or permissions modified for a user.)
2. Schedule-Based Automation - Schedule a task to be performed at a set time each day (e.g. Restart your servers every night at midnight.)
3. Event-Driven Automation - Automate a set of tasks based on system events (e.g. When load is increasing bring more servers online and when load decreases take servers offline)

If you download the Tech Preview of Workflow Studio (free download here) you can look at some of the sample templates we include with the product and get a look at some On-Demand Automation out of the box. The Tech Preview doesn't really provide any help with scheduling or event management, but this type of functionality is being added to the product.

Next, let's look at what I think are the 3 key categories of use cases for Workflow Studio and some examples that you could put in action today:

1. Server Resource Management = Dynamic Delivery Center - Transform your data center into a delivery center by creating workflows that tie together your server provisioning process (both physical and virtual) with your web, desktop, and application delivery processes.
2. Power Management = Green Data Center - Being able to power on/off both physical and virtual servers automatically provides the ability to better manage your resources and, ultimately, save $$ by having your power-hungry servers off when they are not needed.
3. User Management = Automated User Provisioning - Every organization has a process for provisioning and de-provisioning user accounts, but often these processes involve multiple manual steps. Automating the process end-to-end ensures that best practices are followed in exactly the same way each time.

I hope this encourages everyone to think about what kinds of tasks you could automate in your environment. Let me know in the comments what kinds of things you would like to automate or you can find my email address in my profile if you want to email me directly.