In this blog post, I will show you how to manage Windows Server or Client with Ansible.
For many years Ansible was only capable of managing Linux machine; however, things have changed recently.
For Windows machine management Ansible is using WinRM and not SSH.
Enable WinRM listener
To enable WinRM on my Windows machine, I will allow WinRM (if it is not enabled) using the following command.
winrm quickconfig
Note: Make sure you run it as Administrator.
Run Script and Enable
Ansible has a GitHub script you can run on your machine that will configure WinRM with many recommended settings.
I recommend you use this method:
Check Listener
After enabling WinRM, you can check that it is enabled using the following command.
winrm enumerate winrm/config/Listener
Note: You should see the output below.
Install WinRM on Control Host
To manage, Windows machine, we need to install the WinRM deployment package for Linux.
You install it using the following commands.
yum -y install python-pip pip install "pywinrm>=0.2.2" pip install "pywinrm>=0.3.0"
Note: I am installing two versions because version 0.3 might not work if you have Python 2 on your Ansible node.
Hosts File – Windows
In the hosts’ file (/etc/ansible/hosts) create a Windows collection and add your machine.
You will also need to add the var section below it and enter the username and password of your Windows user to login to the machines.
[windows] 172.16.0.5 [windows:vars] ansible_user=administrator ansible_password=enter_server_password ansible_connection=winrm ansible_winrm_server_cert_validation=ignore
Test
To test that everything is working I will run the following command that will ping my host.
ansible windows -i hosts -m win_ping
