7 ms·

Unfortunately, we were forced to toss out Ansible immediately in our tool selection process because it did not support Windows OS clients without Cygwin. Also,

Unfortunately, we were forced to toss out Ansible immediately in our tool selection process because it did not support Windows OS clients without Cygwin. Also, none of the "VM lifecycle management" tools we needed like Foreman or its commercial equivalents had any integrations with Ansible. These concerns left Ansible dead on arrival for us. It sounds like a decent tool if it matches your needs.

mpdehaan2 13y ago
(note: Ansible creator here) Yeah, there's no Windows now. If we do it, I'd want it to push powershell over native means. I'm still not 100% convinced it's something Windows admins want to do in a large enough number to focus on it, but input is always good and would be interested in hearing more about use cases folks want. As for lifecycle, Ansible has significantly less provisioning integration required than some of the other systems because all you need to do is get your SSH keys in there -- less bootstrapping. It also has a pluggable inventory system so you can get your list of hosts/variables from things like EC2 or OpenStack, so with things like cloud-init, that is usually what folks need. And there are some modules for spinning up new guests in various systems. (I'd like to see a vcenter inventory plugin too). I'm also the original author of Cobbler and there's integration with that on the provisioning side, and for something else similar, it's largely the case of writing an inventory plugin and making sure the key is installed.
- jessaustin 13y ago
  I'm still not 100% convinced it's something Windows admins want to do in a large enough number to focus on it... I think this is much more common now that windows in the cloud is quite easy. (My company seems to have as many windows instances in EC2 as linux.) I do agree with your preference for powershell over cygwin.
- mncolinlee 13y ago
  I'm glad to hear from the creator. That's one reason I love HN. Our Windows folks are big Powershell fans here. You wouldn't find too many complaints with it. The biggest problem going with Powershell would be bootstapping it into the environment if it's not already installed or if you depend upon a more recent version. Since we're actively evaluating lifecycle management tools right now, this is our main concern. Many of the integrations to provisioning tools flow downhill from frontends which manage the state of many systems. We find ourselves choosing the best-integrated stack rather than evaluating provisioning software. The plumbing is very important, but a well-written lifecycle tool should make the copper pipes less visible.
- csears 13y ago
  I think there is significant demand for a good Windows solutions in this space. Chef and Puppet have Windows support, but I don't see much community momentum around it. Powershell is the obvious choice, and, as of v3, I think it would be a viable transport for Ansible. If you or anyone on this thread wants to put some ideas on paper for a PoC, I'd be glad to help. Email in profile. PS. Thanks for your work on Cobbler. We used it recently for automating VM template builds.
  - kryten 13y ago
    There is already SCOM+SCCM for this but you better have some bars of gold lying around that you can afford to toss out of the window.
conradfr 13y ago
Seeing as Ansible is out of the question, what would be the best and/or simplest of these tools to learn and use on a Windows client (with Vagrant, remote Linux server etc). I want to choose one of them but can't decide which one to pick.
- giulianob 13y ago
  The simplest one I've found other than Ansible that supports Windows is Saltstack. But it does require a master and isn't quite as intuitive as Ansible imo but close.
- mncolinlee 13y ago
  I can't speak to best or simplest yet. Puppet, Chef, and Salt all support Windows clients. I would try writing the same recipe in each of them and see which works best for you. All of them can now support easy, domain-specific languages in JSON or YAML. Puppet is the oldest and has the largest community. Chef is almost as old and large and seems most popular with the Rails community. Salt is the youngest and has the most active contributors.
- frio 13y ago
  Having used Puppet and Chef in the past, Salt is a breath of fresh air. I've found it much simpler to use.
mechanical_fish 13y ago
Please tell us what you've decided to use. I have an occasional customer who is trying to deploy .NET servers on AWS using Puppet and he reports that there's not a lot of step-by-step guidance on how to do it. Just bootstrapping the thing is a pain, requiring some kind of Powershell incantation to impersonate "curl".
- mncolinlee 13y ago
  I don't have a simple answer yet. We're still eliminating options. Right now our long list still stands at: Foreman, Redhat's ManageIQ EMC, UrbanCode's Terraform, CloudBolt C2, vCloud Automation Center, BMC's Cloud Lifecycle Management, and IBM's SmartCloud Orchestrator. Most of these use libvirt and one of Puppet, Chef, or Salt under the hood.

mpdehaan2 13y ago

(note: Ansible creator here) Yeah, there's no Windows now. If we do it, I'd want it to push powershell over native means. I'm still not 100% convinced it's something Windows admins want to do in a large enough number to focus on it, but input is always good and would be interested in hearing more about use cases folks want. As for lifecycle, Ansible has significantly less provisioning integration required than some of the other systems because all you need to do is get your SSH keys in there -- less bootstrapping. It also has a pluggable inventory system so you can get your list of hosts/variables from things like EC2 or OpenStack, so with things like cloud-init, that is usually what folks need. And there are some modules for spinning up new guests in various systems. (I'd like to see a vcenter inventory plugin too). I'm also the original author of Cobbler and there's integration with that on the provisioning side, and for something else similar, it's largely the case of writing an inventory plugin and making sure the key is installed.

jessaustin 13y ago
I'm still not 100% convinced it's something Windows admins want to do in a large enough number to focus on it... I think this is much more common now that windows in the cloud is quite easy. (My company seems to have as many windows instances in EC2 as linux.) I do agree with your preference for powershell over cygwin.
mncolinlee 13y ago
I'm glad to hear from the creator. That's one reason I love HN. Our Windows folks are big Powershell fans here. You wouldn't find too many complaints with it. The biggest problem going with Powershell would be bootstapping it into the environment if it's not already installed or if you depend upon a more recent version. Since we're actively evaluating lifecycle management tools right now, this is our main concern. Many of the integrations to provisioning tools flow downhill from frontends which manage the state of many systems. We find ourselves choosing the best-integrated stack rather than evaluating provisioning software. The plumbing is very important, but a well-written lifecycle tool should make the copper pipes less visible.
csears 13y ago
I think there is significant demand for a good Windows solutions in this space. Chef and Puppet have Windows support, but I don't see much community momentum around it. Powershell is the obvious choice, and, as of v3, I think it would be a viable transport for Ansible. If you or anyone on this thread wants to put some ideas on paper for a PoC, I'd be glad to help. Email in profile. PS. Thanks for your work on Cobbler. We used it recently for automating VM template builds.
- kryten 13y ago
  There is already SCOM+SCCM for this but you better have some bars of gold lying around that you can afford to toss out of the window.

conradfr 13y ago

Seeing as Ansible is out of the question, what would be the best and/or simplest of these tools to learn and use on a Windows client (with Vagrant, remote Linux server etc). I want to choose one of them but can't decide which one to pick.

giulianob 13y ago
The simplest one I've found other than Ansible that supports Windows is Saltstack. But it does require a master and isn't quite as intuitive as Ansible imo but close.
mncolinlee 13y ago
I can't speak to best or simplest yet. Puppet, Chef, and Salt all support Windows clients. I would try writing the same recipe in each of them and see which works best for you. All of them can now support easy, domain-specific languages in JSON or YAML. Puppet is the oldest and has the largest community. Chef is almost as old and large and seems most popular with the Rails community. Salt is the youngest and has the most active contributors.
frio 13y ago
Having used Puppet and Chef in the past, Salt is a breath of fresh air. I've found it much simpler to use.

mechanical_fish 13y ago

Please tell us what you've decided to use. I have an occasional customer who is trying to deploy .NET servers on AWS using Puppet and he reports that there's not a lot of step-by-step guidance on how to do it. Just bootstrapping the thing is a pain, requiring some kind of Powershell incantation to impersonate "curl".

mncolinlee 13y ago
I don't have a simple answer yet. We're still eliminating options. Right now our long list still stands at: Foreman, Redhat's ManageIQ EMC, UrbanCode's Terraform, CloudBolt C2, vCloud Automation Center, BMC's Cloud Lifecycle Management, and IBM's SmartCloud Orchestrator. Most of these use libvirt and one of Puppet, Chef, or Salt under the hood.