Setting up Windows hosts for Ansible control using WinRM
So far, we have talked about running Ansible itself from Windows. This is helpful, especially in a corporate environment where perhaps Windows end user systems are the norm. However, what about actual automation tasks? The good news is that, as already stated, automation of Windows with Ansible does not require WSL. One of Ansible's core premises is to be agentless, and that remains just as true for Windows as for Linux. It is fair to assume that almost any modern Linux host will have SSH access enabled, and similarly, most modern Windows hosts have a remote management protocol built in, called WinRM. Ardent followers of Windows will know that Microsoft has, in a more recent edition, added both the OpenSSH client and server packages, and since the last edition of this book was published, experimental support for these has been added to Ansible. For security reasons, both of these technologies are disabled by default...