Question

A follow-up on this system management question:

Since I probably will not get much feedback on serverfault I’ll give it a try here.

My main concern is to reflect the dependencies between the databases, services ans tasks/jobs I’ll have to manage.

Besides considering Powershell, I even thought about using MSBuild because it would allow for modeling dependencies and reuse configuration targets.

In other words: What technology should I use to develop a flexible solution that will allow me to stop service A, B and C on machine D in the right order and disable task E on machine F when taking down database X?

… and I’d like to reuse the part for stopping service B and C when taking down database Y.

Answer 1

If you are familiar with PowerShell and want to work with dependencies, try psake. What it looks like:

psake script.ps1:-------
properties {
 $dbServer = 'sqlexpress'
 ...
}
task default -depend StopServer1, StopServer2

task StopS1 -depend MakeS1Backup, StopSqlServer1 {
 ...
}
task MakeS1Backup {
 ... make backup
}
task StopSqlServer1 {
 stop-service ...
}
# and anything similar to StopServer2

Then you may call it like this (there are more options):

Invoke-Psake script.ps1 
#or
Invoke-Psake script.ps1 -task StopS1 #calls only StopS1 task and all other scripts it depends on
#or
Invoke-Psake script.ps1 -task MakeS1Backup #only backups S1, it doesn't depend on anything else

What it does – it stops server 1 (task StopS1) and before that it processes all the tasks that StopS1 depends on. So before stopping S1 backup of S1 is made and Sql server 1 is stopped and so on.

I like it much better than msbuild configuration, which is very verbose and ugly (although very powerfull).