It's definitely more work, but a lot of provisioning can be currently automated using Chef. It plays surprisingly well with Windows. We've developed approach u

It's definitely more work, but a lot of provisioning can be currently automated using Chef. It plays surprisingly well with Windows. We've developed approach using Chef that spans Linux and Windows boxes. To log in and run some script on Windows boxes, we use WinRM, which is integrated with Chef knife tool and works almost as well as SSH.