Background
I spend most of my time working with Linux but occasionally I come across Oracle on Windows, so I thought it’s about time that I tried my hand at using Ansible on Windows.
Ansible on Windows
You can not currently run Ansible on Windows, but you can manage Windows servers from a Linux or Mac Ansible control machine.
Ansible uses ‘SSH’ to manage Linux servers, on Windows Ansible requires ‘winRM’ Windows Remote Manager services. The Ansible docs details prerequisites, which include PowerShell v3 and .Net 4.0 and winRM, the steps to set-up winRM can be found here.
If you read my previous Blog Post Getting started with Ansible and Oracle you will have seen me use ‘ping’ to check connectivity to a Linux server, to do this in a Windows environment we use ‘win_ping’ module via the -m option.
You can see that the Ansible ‘ping’ and ‘win_ping’ both return the familiar ‘pong’ message, indicating good connectivity.
Ok, that’s pretty cool, now let’s try running the Windows ‘whoami.exe’ using the ‘win_command’ module.
And a quick ‘Hello World’ test via PowerShell and the ‘win_shell’ module.
Next steps, create some Windows playbooks and test, but that’s for another Blog.
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