Increase the Max Number of Simultaneous Runbook Executions

Are you a really heavy Orchestrator user? You may have a problem you don’t even know about, particularly if you only have a single runbook server. Microsoft has chosen to set the maximum number of runbooks that a runbook server can execute at once to 50 as a default. Herein lies the issue, if your deployment would regularly surpass this number then you may begin seeing slow execution times, queueing, and potentially SQL blocking.

The good news is that this is a fairly simple problem to rectify and a standard runbook server deployment can typically handle the extra work. To begin, you can run the following SQL query against your Orchestrator database to see what the limit is currently set at on each runbook server.

SELECT * FROM dbo.ActionServers

Next you will want to update the max running policies (runbooks) to better fit your environment. You can do this with a tool included in your install directory. Browse to the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft System Center\Orchestrator\Management Server and then open a command prompt as an account that has SQL modify rights.

aspt.exe * 200

The command above will set all runbook servers to allow for a max of 200 concurrent runbook executions. You can change 200 to a number appropriate for your environment as needed. It’s also possible to only change the limit on a specific runbook server by replacing * with the name of the server.

You will want to monitor your runbook servers performance for awhile after making this change to make sure you are not overloading them.