Windows Server Configuration Management Best Practices

Posted by Anton Gogolev on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Anton Gogolev
Published on 2013-11-11T08:29:48Z Indexed on 2013/11/11 9:59 UTC
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configuration-management

Chef/Pupper/Ansible are cool and all, but they are second-class citizens on Windows at best.

We have a bunch of "snowflake" (one of a kind) machines (baremetal and virtual) that nobody really know what's going on with. What I want is to start establishing basic configuration management for said servers, starting from installing Windows, installing and enabling various Roles and Features, setting up Services, Shares, Users and deploying webapps.

PowerShell DSC looks promising, but it's not yet here and appears to be over-engineered, Puppet and the like are again not first-class. There's a bunch of tooks and TLAs like Windows ADK, DISM, OCSetup, etc. and it seems to me that the "Configuration Management" story on Windows is not precisely rainbows and unicorns.

What I want is a Puppet/Chef-like, lightweight tool (no System Center Configuration Management, please) which would allow us to "version-control our server infrastructure" and bring all the benefits of CM.

So, where do I look for the tool that does this kind of thing?

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