Ansible's inventory file is fundamental for defining and organizing the servers to be managed in a SQL Server Availability Group. It serves as the "address book" for Ansible to use when patching these instances.
Next up are roles.
We'll build an example role as part of this blog series (disclai...
In my previous post, we explored the concept of rolling updates for SQL Server Availability Groups and how Ansible can transform this complex process into a streamlined, repeatable operation. We discussed the benefits of automation and outlined a high-level strategy for implementing this approach.
...
Over the past few weeks in the AutomateSQL Insiders Community, we've been discussing SQL Server patching. More specifically patching Availability Groups in a rolling fashion. This technique keeps your replicas up to date while maintaining minimal downtime.
Automated patching is nothing new. You...
Service management is a pretty common task for both DBAs and Windows administrators. If you're like me, you've spent countless hours remoting into servers just to check the status of a service or to manually restart it. Perhaps you've needed to disable a service briefly while troubleshooting or ch...
My Early Challenges with Ansible on Windows
When I was getting started with Ansible back in 2017, I ran into issue after issue. Coming from a Windows background, trying to use a tool that was primarily used on Linux meant there was little documentation to reference. You might be saying, "Why didn...
How do I install Ansible on Windows?
This is a common question for those of you who are just getting started with Ansible or are curious about how to use it from a Windows machine.
When I talk about installing Ansible, I'm referring to installing the Ansible control node—the machine from which you...
Many of us, Windows Admins and DBAs struggle with automation. We often cobble together PowerShell and T-SQL scripts to manage our environments, or worse, we remote into machines to perform repetitive tasks manually. These approaches create problems:
- Scripts become difficult to maintain
- Document ...
Windows Server 2025 includes OpenSSH—no need to install additional software. However, you need to configure it before you can use it. In this post, I'll show you how to use Ansible and key-based authentication to connect to and manage Windows Server 2025.
Prerequisites:
OpenSSH is installed by d...
SQL Server Management Studio 21 (Preview) was announced last week at PASS Data Community Summit 2024. It has some cool new features that are available in the preview.
You can check those out here.
If you're familiar with Ansible, you know how easy it is to deploy software. I'll share a playbook...
Edition: Saturday, August 3rd, 2024
A few weeks ago I needed to configure replication between two SQL Server 2022 named instances, on separate networks. In this configuration, the publisher would push data to the subscriber and all related replication jobs would reside at the publisher.
It's be...
Edition: Saturday, July 13th, 2024
On July 9th, 2024, Microsoft released a GDR update for multiple editions of SQL Server. As a DBA, you may be planning how to install this update in your lower environments (DEV, QA, UAT, etc.), tested, and then deploy to production.
However, you may have also ex...
Edition: Saturday, July 6th, 2024
As you begin creating playbooks to automate your work, you'll soon discover they can become many 100s of lines of YAML.
Ansible Roles, allow you to group tasks, variables, handlers, and other artifacts. Today, I'll focus on an example role I've built and used to...