There's probably a variety of procedures that folks use for starting services for distributed applications. At one of our current clients, we have a central Windows batch file that restarts the various portal components that are deployed across several Windows servers. The portal services were being restarted using the Service Controller command ('sc') to start each service on its respective server. For instance, Automation Server was started with something like this:

sc \automation_host_name start "ptautomationserver"

Using the Service Controller to...