When working with clusters, you will sometimes encounter a task that should only be executed once for the entire cluster. For example, you might want to upgrade the schema of a clustered database or issue a command to reconfigure a Pacemaker cluster that would normally be issued on one node and replicated to all other nodes by Pacemaker. You could, of course, address this with a special inventory with only one host in it, or even by writing a special play that references one host from the inventory, but this is inefficient and starts to make your code fragmented.

Instead, you can write your code as you normally would, but make use of the special run_once directive for any tasks you want to run only once on your inventory. For example, let's reuse the 10-host inventory that we defined earlier in this chapter. Now, let's proceed to demonstrate...