Ansible Windows Automation

[@1computer]

i like this 🙂 Great job

[@marlonramanan2280]

Hi Alex, I enjoyed your video. My aim is to use Ansible to leverage doing system administration for Windows systems. Where I am from, IT budgets are not large and we leverage older machines (12 to 15 years old even) with a supported Windows 10 OS. My question to you is that do you foresee issues where ansible may not be able to manage these type of machines properly? I've been having a challenge in my production environment (with new windows machines to older machines) where I use ansible- where if I use simple playbooks to do a ping for example, I get successful responses. However, if I rerun that ping playbook (with win_ping module) soon after, I get different results (non ok) even those machines are still online! When I run more complex playbooks( For example, using Powershell (win_shell)to gather hardware information for the hosts: CPU info, RAM, HDD info etc), I get a lot of unreachable = 1 errors (ok=1 changed=0 unreachable=1 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0). Success looks like this (ok=9 changed=4 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0 )This is confusing to me, that sometimes connection is good, but then it's unreachable. Our backend network is Gigabit Ethernet and certified as well! Looking for ideas. I'm using certificate based auth with winrm. I do have the issue documented in a forum but I don't think comments allows me to post links. Thanks for any advice!

[@alexdworjan]

docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/os_guide/windows_setup.html#host-requirements I am assuming you are talking about Windows Servers not Windows Desktops (desktops tend to have more connection issues, especially laptops since the network connectivity isn't permanent). If you are talking about Windows Servers, I would verify your connection settings (ensuring WinRM and all of your settings are set properly, and that you aren't receiving any certificate errors). I would also look at the specific error the playbook is giving you. The exact module you are trying to run will give you more details about what's going on (you can also increase the verbosity of your playbook to get better connection debugging information). I would start there to get a better idea of what issues you might be facing.

[@marlonramanan2280]

@@alexdworjan Thank you for your reply. They are all Windows 10 and 11 Professional Desktops. I understand where you are coming from. My hope is that Ansible can still be a great tool for managing Desktop devices -and that once there are ways to ensure desktops are on and connected (via Wake-on-LAN etc), ansible can service them properly! I will explore the resources you have provided and dig deeper!