System Center 2012 Orchestrator provides a powerful workflow management solution which allows IT administrators to automate different tasks exposed by the platform. At the heart of the Orchestrator is a set of Runbooks which outline the sequence of activities for a given task. A number of resources are available on Technet which explain the concept and provide guidance on building these Runbooks.
Charles Joy is a Senior Program Manager with the Windows Server & System Center group in Microsoft who has authored a set of Hyper-V Replica sample Runbooks which can be downloaded for free from TechNet Galleries. In his blog post http://blogs.technet.com/b/building_clouds/archive/2013/02/11/automation-orchestrating-hyper-v-replica-with-system-center-for-planned-failover.aspx he explains the high level concepts and also shows a Planned Failover in action.
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