Maintenance windows – How To

[Kevin De Schrijver]

Hi,

I’m currently still experimenting how to optimise BatchPatch.

One of the things I’m interested in is creating an easily modifiable maintenance window.

All our servers in the batch job have a real life maintenance windows during which they can be rebooted. Let’s say Server X reboot at 03:00, Move Cluster group at 03:10, Reboot Server Yat 3:20, etc

Is there a way we can set this reboot time for each machine and select the day to execute for multiple (all) servers? At the moment the scheduled task module only allows weird preconfigured options. Daily, Weekly, monthly, etc are all good but in our case we want to activate a reboot cycle every second tuesday of the month for obvious reasons. And in some cases we would even require a reboot cycles at a specific date for the entire server fleet. (still during the maintenance window, just on a specific date)

Is there an easy way to accomplish this without needing to set scheduled tasks for each server each month or each time we want to reboot cycle the server fleet?

In short having a bunch of scheduled tasks on a specific time waiting to be activated and then going into a Maintenance window where you set a date to trigger all the underlying actions

[doug]

You have a couple of options, I think, to accomplish what you are trying to do.

First, you said you want to activate a task every second Tuesday of the month. In the scheduler recurrence drop-down menu you can use ‘Monthly (2nd Tuesday) + X days’. In this case you would set X=0 so that the task executes on the 2nd Tuesday. And for example if you set X=1 then the task would execute on the Wednesday following the 2nd Tuesday (some months this will be the same day as the 2nd Wednesday, but other months it will not be the same, which is why we provide the option for + X days).

Second, you said you want to essentially be able to modify the execution day separately from the execution time so that you can “activate” your maintenance window and have all the jobs run at their scheduled times on the day specified for the maintenance window without having to always re-apply new scheduled tasks for the desired day/time. While this is not *exactly* doable in BP, you can still accomplish the same thing in a slightly different way. If you set all of your computers to the desired time, and if you set the execution day to a day in the past (so for example you could just set it to yesterday’s date), then if you also set the recurrence drop-down to ‘Daily’, you can enable and disable your maintenance window on the day of the maintenance by simply enabling and disabling the task scheduler using the little clock icon in the upper right corner of the BP window. What will happen is if, for example, you have a server that is set to reboot at 10PM yesterday with daily recurrence, then let’s say your maintenance begins on Saturday. When that Saturday arrives you can enable the task scheduler and the daily recurrence will automatically adjust all of the execution days for every task to be that same day (Saturday, in this case). So even if you enable the task scheduler on Saturday at 11:30AM, the tasks will then execute at 10PM that evening. Does this make sense? Does this solve your problem? As far as I understand from your described requirements is that the only drawback of this solution is that you would have to enable the task scheduler on the day of the maintenance window. You would not be able to enable the scheduler in advance of that day. But when that day arrives you could enable it at any time during that day. And then you would have to disable the scheduler after the maintenance is over and before the scheduled time (10PM) of the following day. We can consider for a future version of BP to provide the ability to schedule a day/time for the scheduler to start/stop, which would allow you to remove the manual step of enabling the scheduler on the day of maintenance and then disabling it when the maintenance is over.

-Doug

[Author]

Posts