Win\Exchange\SQL - 'managed' restarts

[Dave Inglis]

Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, i have googled and searched these forums to no avail....

I have c. 100 proliant servers i am managing using SIM 5.3. I am new to SIM and am just starting to get to grips with the basics, so forgive me if this is a stupid question.

My question is regarding 'managed' restarts of remote servers. For example, of my 100 servers 35 run Exchange 2003. If i push out a common driver\firmware package that requires a restart, SIM will happily force these servers down. However we use a set procedure for restarting servers such as Exchange\SQL etc. ie. stopping services first.

Is there any way I can lever SIM\Agents to run a batch file prior to a system restart? Or something to that effect.

In an ideal world, the end result would be something along the lines of the following:-

1. Deploy patch from SIM, ticking the 'Auto Restart' flag.
2. VCA installs patch, runs my litle batch file\vbscript\whatever, and restarts the server safely.

All the target servers i am talking about run Windows (2003).

I do not have OpenSSH installed on the target servers, i tried to avoid it - but if SSH will allow SIM to do this then i have no issue deploying openssh onto these boxes.

It does look like i could knock up a 'custom tool' to do this that runs on the CMS itself, or even distributed around. Not sure how i would time it - perhaps in response to a 'software installed but requires restart' event if such an event exists.

I'm sure thousands of people have run into this with Exchange\SQL, and there is a nice simple answer!

Many thanks for your time.

Dave