- I'll also show you how to use Ansible to configure your new Windows 2019 server!
I’m going to follow the steps from the hashicorp website and create a customised Windows 2019 server and setup winrm, and set the Administrator password.
Once the AMI image is ready, were going to build an instance bases on our new AMI image, then get Ansible to setup the server for us.
This is the hashicorp link. I'm made some updated to their code like the region in AWS. You can do the same one you clone the code.
I won’t be going into detail on these items:
- I’m assuming your have already installed Packer!
- I’m also assuming you know how to obtain and use the AWS access and Secret key from the AWS console.
Don’t worry if you don’t know how to do these steps. You can follow my previous video’s where I show you how to do this in details:
- Build you’re first EC2 instance: https://youtu.be/XzWyudb4N04
- Install Packer and create an AMI: https://youtu.be/dIAhHhQ_J-c
Now I’ll show you how to do it. A quick note.
"I make these video’s for you. I hope they help with your learning so feel free to share any of them with your colleagues, on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. I'd really appreciate it if you could Subscribe so you see new content I post and please, like the video".
If you have question, pop them in the comments and I’ll reply as soon as I can. Now, lets get down to it.
Steps
- Create the required packer files
- Create the AMI image
- Build a windows server from the new AMI
- Login to test credentials
- Open the FW for winrm-HTTP
- Test with Ansible win_ping to confirm connectivity
- Now run my test playbook
Feel free to clone my repo. Please give the repo a like and follow me if this code has helped you.
git clone https://github.com/dmccuk/packer_windows_build.git
cd packer_windows_build
now build the packer image:
packer validate windows_2019.pkr.hcl
packer build windows_2019.pkr.hcl
The build process takes around 5 minutes...
Once it completed, you will see something like this:
learn-packer.amazon-ebs.firstrun-windows: AMI: ami-0636bd65d5cd8dce4
==> learn-packer.amazon-ebs.firstrun-windows: Waiting for AMI to become ready...
==> learn-packer.amazon-ebs.firstrun-windows: Terminating the source AWS instance...
==> learn-packer.amazon-ebs.firstrun-windows: Cleaning up any extra volumes...
==> learn-packer.amazon-ebs.firstrun-windows: No volumes to clean up, skipping
==> learn-packer.amazon-ebs.firstrun-windows: Deleting temporary security group...
==> learn-packer.amazon-ebs.firstrun-windows: Deleting temporary keypair...
Build 'learn-packer.amazon-ebs.firstrun-windows' finished after 8 minutes 503 milliseconds.
==> Wait completed after 8 minutes 503 milliseconds
==> Builds finished. The artifacts of successful builds are:
--> learn-packer.amazon-ebs.firstrun-windows: AMIs were created:
eu-west-2: ami-0636bd65d5cd8dce4
I'm not doing anything amazing here. I'm just creating an EC2 image from the AMI we just created. Pop into the console and follow my steps in the demo.
I've provided the Ansible code that is ready to go for this demo. We're using winrm over HTTP. This is obviously not entrypted and not recommended for production. I'm just using it for the demo. You can change the script to do whatever you need, including changing the configuration to HTTPS or even SSH (I have demo's on this. Comment in the YouTube video if you need a hand).
Now lets test our Ansible connectivity with win_ping
- Update the hosts.ini file with your windows server IP or Public name. I'm using the IP address.
- Open the winrm HTTP port into the incoming rules (watch the video).
ansible win -i hosts.ini -m win_ping
You should get a pong back. Check my video for the correct output.
Once that's successful, we can run my test playbooks against the windows server and configure it to our needs. My playbook does lots of things like create directories and files, install apache, uses a template to pull out some server facts into a local file, and a few more things. I've already setup all the settings you need to connect to a server over winrm (HTTP).
Because we're running Ansible as the "Administrator" user and supplying the password, we don;t need to supply any other options.
ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini windows.yml
Check my video for the output.
In my video, I'll login to the Windows 2019 server and we can have a look around and see everything that Ansible did.
You just used packer to create a custom windows 2019 server and you've configured it with Ansible. Good Job!
Now maybe try some of the following?:
- Install openssh in the bootstrap_win.txt
- Update the variables in the hosts.ini file with the SSH ones - checkout my demo in that here
- Add additional things to install either in Ansible or in the bootstrap_win.txt file.
Let me know how you get on in the comments!
Now that the demo has worked, I'm going to destroy my EC2 instance, the AMI image we created and the snapshot. This way I won;t be charged by AWS for any of these resource sticking around. I advise you to do the same as you don;t want to be spending any money you don;t need to.
Follow my demo and I'll show you how to delete everything.