Orchestration with DSC

DSC
1

I just watched the TechEd overview on PowerShell DSC. I am interested in how you would handle orchestration with DSC. For example:

Stop windows service on server A
Stop windows service on Server B
Copy files to upgrade service on Server B
start windows service on Server B
start windows service on Server A

The technology looks very exciting.

Thanks,
Michael Hedgpeth

2

Cross-machine dependencies are a feature being added to DSC with PowerShell v5; that sort of orchestration isn’t currently available. However, you will want to be careful about how you use this even when that option is available; you don’t want to be stopping and starting services every time DSC checks your configuration, for example, and there’s not a particularly good way to tell it to do that only if the files need to be updated.

Cool as it is, DSC isn’t always the right tool for the job.

3

Thanks for the answer. Yes, as I think about it the orchestration described above is probably not a great process; ideally you would want services from disparate nodes to be independent of one another and thus tolerant of outages