I would like to hear if anyone has a good approach for, in a maintenance window, to control a restart sequence across several servers after patching.
My customer has a set of servers that are dependent on each other and the startup sequence is important to have the system working. In short terms this can be illustrated like.
Dependent servers are A, B and C
Dependendt services are L, M and N
Sequence could be like:
Stop service L on server C
1.1) Service has stopped
Restart server A
Verify that service M and N on server A is running
Restart server B and C
Is it possible to control status across servers? I can only think of one way - implementing each line in a separate task and then control the restarts using delays. All tasks should then be gathered in a single baseline.
All servers are windows servers and a single task (executed on a “parent” server) with several commands like “dos shutdown /m \ /r” and "dos sc \ stop " is also an option.
Any best practices and good ideas are welcome, thanks in advance.
There is also some current active discussions at IBM about how to better handle these types of situations. There may be some forth-coming developments on this front.
I was wondering the same thing myself, since certain servers have dependencies and need to be rebooted and available before others.
I have created a “Restart in 5 Minutes” Task and have tested it as part of a Baseline. The ActionScript is just:
restart 300
You could potentially allow a Task like this within a Baseline to control the reboots rather than restarting as a Post-Action. Either multiple Tasks with different restart times can target machines by relevance, or you could build more logic into your ActionScript.
The one problem is that your Baseline will always be relevant if this Task is relevant. You may need to add this relevance too:
We’re going to be discussing the work we’re doing to address automation/sequencing in a web-conference this Friday at 9am Pacific time. If you’re interested in hearing what we’re working on and giving us early feedback, we’d be happy to have you. You’ll have to sign off on our Beta agreement, after which you’ll be added to a developerworks group in which we discuss our ongoing development work.
Beta Agreement
Thread with a bit more info about the customer program.