Running tasks in sequence on different hosts

[Henning Juva]

Hi,

First thanks for a wonderful tool. Best new technology I've used since git.

We currently manage about 20 machines using a role based setup described in best practices. So far everything has been easy and intuitive but now I've come across a corner case I'm struggling to fit into the model.

I want to setup a number of machines to be members of a cluster. It's currently a very manual process which requires a number of steps executed in order on different machines with some pauses added in. The old school shell script way would be something along these lines for machines A, B and C. There are maybe 20 steps in total.

A: Create cluster

B: Create cluster

C: Create cluster 

sleep 20

A: Add B

A: Add C

A: Create ensemble

sleep 20

B: join ensemble

C: join ensemble

etc...

Is there a way to achieve this nicely in ansible? I guess what I'm looking for is some way to execute tasks in sequence where each task could run on a different host than the previous. Like if you had a host attribute you could set directly on the task. At the moment I've looked at using the limit option and the hosts tag in the playbook but none seem a good match for this.

Any creative suggestions is welcome, otherwise I guess I'll just have to accept 1 remaining bash script.

Best regards,

Henning

[Brian Coca]

sounds like you want multiple plays in the same file  and serial: 1