What is Windows equivalent to Puppet/chef?

Question

Does windows have an equivalent to puppet/chef for configuration management?

score 14 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 07 '11 at 19:42

I wouldn't call it equivalent, Microsoft's SCCM (Systems Center Configuration Manager) is aimed at the same goal - managing configuration of multiple systems. This is the tool that most Windows sites use. (http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/configuration-manager/cm-overview.aspx)

score 9 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 07 '11 at 19:11

A declarative configuration management tool written in Ruby? Well, not really, but sort of:

Puppet supports Windows.
Chef kind of suppports Windows.
The "native" & inexpensive Windows configuration management would be Active Directory Group Policies.
There are also 3rd party tools like WPKG for 'simpler' application deployment if you don't use Active Directory.

gWaldo · Answer 3 · 2011-04-13T15:24:55.747

Group Policy. (No, I'm not trolling...)

The exact purpose of Group policy is to define forest/domain (organizational) policies for computers' settings. It's built-in, well-supported, and definitive. If the user doesn't have admin access to their local machine, they won't be able to change the setting. If they are, their changes will revert to policy the next time that the machine checks into the DC (every [90 minutes + 0-30 minutes] by default)

If versioning / diff-ing of your policies is important to you, see my comment below for how to get that data, and then check in your changes via source control. It may even be worthwhile to set up a scheduled task to periodically do this automatically (in case somebody forgets.)

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 04 '13 at 15:05

1

Chef supports Windows (for quite some time.)

answered Feb 04 '13 at 15:05

gWaldo

12,027

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jul 25 '14 at 15:06

Puppet certainly supports Windows and quite well. Where it has shortfalls, PowerShell does the work, and you fire it with Puppet and store all the infrastructure code in Git/SVN/etc. I'm onsite at a customer automating the Windows environment with Puppet now. Search for "windows" at forge.puppetlabs.com

score 0 · Answer 6 · edited Feb 24 '15 at 13:27

Most are ignoring a lot of Microsoft Technologies used for "Infrastructure as Code" PowerShell, Desired State Configuration, CIM, WMI, Group Policy, SMA, Orchestrator, OneGet, etc.

Puppet and Chef are absolutely not ready to replace SCCM in Microsoft Enterprises, I will rather use PowerShell and Group Policy instead of SCCM then use Puppet instead of SCCM.

Microsoft is fighting it's way back into the DevOps and Continuous Delivery world, And it's doing that with great success, Have a look at DSC, it`s just fantastic! and not only for MS products, Because MS uses CIM, WS-MAN and MOF standardization, this will make Microsoft a big competitor again.

What is Windows equivalent to Puppet/chef?

6 Answers6