Ansible version 1.7 started being able to manage Windows machines with a few basic modules. After the acquisition of Ansible by Red Hat, a lot of effort has been put into this task by Microsoft and many other companies and people. By the time of the 2.1 release, Ansible's ability to manage Windows machines was close to being complete. Some modules have been extended to work seamlessly on Unix and Windows, while in other cases, the Windows logic was so different from Unix that new modules needed to be created.
Note
At the moment, using Windows as a control machine is not supported, though some users have tweaked the code and their environment to make it work.
The connection from the control machine to Windows machines is not made over SSH; instead, it's made over Windows Remote Management (WinRM). You can visit Microsoft's website for a detailed explanation and implementation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384426(v=vs.85).aspx.
On the control machine, once you've...