First published on TECHNET on May 15, 2012
Ryan Andorfer, one of our favorite members of the Orchestrator community, has done it again. He has come out with a new utility to help administrators sanitize their runbook export files.Here’s what Ryan has to say:
A ‘difficulty’ we have with migrating policies / Runbooks from one environment (dev) to another (QA / Prod) is that they bring along with them all referenced and unreferenced counter, variables, global configs, computer groups, etc.. When Charles Joy and I first spoke about this and how to do migrations it was suggested that we use a ‘staging’ Orchestrator environment to do a sanitation (cleanup / remove everything we didn’t want moved into our production environments). That worked but it was a very manual process. One thing that I came to realize after chatting with Robert one day was that the export files are simply XML files. Given that fact, I thought that you *
should
* be able to ‘automate’ the cleanup of the export files by looking through each of the configs and seeing if it was actually referenced in one of the exported Runbooks (and removing all of them that were not). To that end I have just finished up a ‘version 1’ of a SanitizeExport.exe utility and I would love to get your feedback on it. It is a command line utility that takes one input parameter (the path to the export to be sanitized). It will create another export file next to it (ends with _sanitized) that is the sanitized version.
You can see a really good description of the utility in Ryan’s blog post here:
http://opalis.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/runbook-sanitation-utility/
You can download the utility from CodePlex here:
http://scorch.codeplex.com/releases/view/87676
Source code is also available on CodePlex here:
http://scorch.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/17993#230263
Thanks again to Ryan for keeping the good stuff coming!
