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...

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...

Windows patching is usually a topic left for Windows administrators.  But what if, as a DBA, you're tasked with patching both the OS and SQL Server?  That scenario is common in smaller or cross-functional IT teams where boundaries between roles aren't so clear.  DBAs can't ignore OS patching for ser...

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...