[chef] How to deploy to nodes synchronously ?

[Irvin Fan < >]

I'm new to chef and still trying to understand how it works. I searched the FAQ and couldn't find the answer to this. Please forgive me if the question has been answered before.

Let's say I have 100 nodes running chef-client daemon. 
If I update the config for those nodes in chef-server my understanding 
is that all those chef-clients will detect the changes for its own node 
and go ahead to do whatever the recipes say to do. How can I control the
 process synchronously. I don't want all my 100 nodes updating at the 
same time because the update process may require restarting Apache. I know one way to do it is to run the chef-client in non-daemon mode. e.g. run "knife ssh <node> chef-client" on nodes one by one. I'm wondering is it possible to still run the chef-client in daemon mode but control the process on server side so that the update happens one node at a time? Maybe I can update the setting one node at a time. But how can I know the chef-client on a particular node is done so that I can move to update the setting for next node?

Thanks

Irvin