Ansible awx – manage windows boxes

In this blog I will be manage a windows box remotely via awx ansible – I will setup the windows box to be managed, I will setup AWX so we can manage windows boxes and then create and run a playbook.

1. On your managed windows box run the following

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Force
Enable-PSRemoting -Force
New-NetFirewallRule -Name "WinRM-HTTP" -DisplayName "WinRM over HTTP" -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 5985 -Action Allow

2. create your inventory file with the following information

Variables yml

ansible_connection: winrm
#ansible_winrm_transport: basic
ansible_winrm_transport: ntlm
ansible_winrm_scheme: http
ansible_port: 5985
ansible_winrm_server_cert_validation: ignore

hosts – have your ip of your windows box

3. Create Credentials as machine type with your domain creds

4. Create your template job

5. example playbook output ipconfig and stop service

---
- name: Run commands on Windows host
  hosts: 192.168.1.11
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - name: Execute a command using win_command
      ansible.windows.win_command:
        cmd: "ipconfig /all"
      register: ipconfig_output

    - name: Print the output of ipconfig
      debug:
        var: ipconfig_output.stdout_lines

    - name: Stop Windows Update service
      ansible.windows.win_shell: |
            Stop-Service -Name "wuauserv" -Force
      register: processes_output

    - name: Print the output of net stop
      debug:
        var: processes_output.stdout_lines

Difference between win_command and win_shell is

Use win_command for simple commands or when shell features are not needed and security is a concern.  Use win_shell when you need to leverage shell features, execute multi-line commands, or when dealing with complex scripts. 

Output