DevOps and Windows

Who am I?Left the corp world for a Solution/Service Provider in 2011

Prior to 2011, primarily focused on Windows and Citrix

Now Linux, Chef, vCloud and Apace CloudStack/Citrix CloudPlatform as well as above. Prefer XenServer

http://twitter.com/pigram86

http://www.todpigram.com

http://github.com/pigram86

Windows automation

Management in past were batch and command files along with Ghost an Ghost walker

Altiris

POSH

System Center

My TaskFind a tool to use with both Linux and Windows

Needed to work with vCloud and CloudStack

Provide Configuration Management and Desired State Config

Be consistent and repeatable

Be efficient and quick

Puppet vs Chef - my choices

Challenges Part 1Not a developer - I didn’t know Ruby

I didn’t know anything about Puppet or Chef

Learning Went to www.codeacademy.com and took the Ruby portion

Bought a Infinite Skills Ruby for Beginners course on www.udemy.com

Sat through both Puppetlabs learning course and the learnchef.getchef.com training

Built both the free open source version of Puppet Server and Chef Server in home lab

Started coding with both on Windows as most of my customers are Windows based

My Dev EnvironmentMacbook Pro 13” mid-2012 OS X 10.10

Chefdk

git

chruby with ruby-build - ruby 2.1.2/1.9.3

Vagrant, Veewee, Packer, Bento

Berkshelf and Test-kitchen with kitchen-driver-vagrant_provision, foodcritic

MDT server - for Autounattend.xml - both for builds and templates

Virtualbox and VMware Fusion

Sublime Text 3 with package control - Chef, DashDoc, Sublime-rubocop

Dash

Use Version Control

Chef and Windows

• Chef provided cookbooks • chef_handler-1.16 • powershell-3.0.7 - pulls in ms_dotnet • windows-1.34.6

Using Chef with Windows

• Reboots • Roles and Features • PageFile • Registry • Installing Software

Reboots

• Both Puppet and Chef were working great until I started combining recipes/modules in a continuous run list.

• Major issue…neither handled pending reboots

reboot_pending.rb• Alex Vinyar (Chef) provided me with a library file to

handle pending reboots. This was added to Chef Client 11.12

• I still use it in all my cookbooks

Using windows_reboot

Install Roles and Features

• DISM - windows_feature

• PowerShell - powershell_script

• Caveat with PowerShell, if role/feature needs a reboot, you have to separate them

DSIM - windows_feature

powershell_script

Windows Pagefile• Use Ohai to grab total memory

• Differs between OS and Hypervisor

• Differs between XenServer and vSphere

• Differs between W2k8R2 and W2012/2012r2

Case Statement for Pagefile

Setting Pagefile - 4GB

Registry

• using registry_key to set registry setting

• Include recursive true

• Use attributes for actual keys

• use ‘/‘ or ‘\\' for ruby to recognize the path

Set registry settingsAttribute

Recipe

Installing Software• using windows_package

• using batch and windows_zipfile

• Installing standalone software

• Installing software that requires the entire ISO

• Always use not_if and only_if for idempotence

• use attributes

Installing filezilla - Standalone

Install Citrix XenDesktop

Testing

For Linux - test kitchen

For Windows mostly utilizing my home chef server and my custom windows boxes for Vagrant

I use Veewee to create the VM, then export to .box. Chef-Client is installed as well as service.

Test to prevent this