An aspect of the present invention simplifies software maintenance of nodes in a data center. In one embodiment, a management system receives data specifying a set of commands to be executed on a node in the data center, and then forms a maintenance script by programmatically incorporating instructions for executing the set of commands on the node and to perform a set of management actions. The management system then executes the maintenance script to cause execution of the set of commands on the nodes, thereby performing maintenance of the node. A user/administrator of the data center needs to specify only the commands, thereby simplifying the software maintenance of data centers. According to another aspect, the maintenance scripts (formed by incorporating the commands provided by a user) are executed as part of a disaster recovery process in the data center.