As might be expected by most systems administrators, managing Windows means that there are resources and configuration data that are not available to non-Windows systems. A list of those resources includes the following:
Roles and features
Batch scripts
Autorun scripts
Software packages (MSIs, installers, and so on)
Printers
Registry manipulation
Paths
Tasks (requires Windows Server 2008)
Pagefiles
System reboots
ZIP files
Not all versions of Windows are supported by Chef, and not all functionality is supported on all platforms. A list of Windows versions known to work with Chef is as follows:
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows Server 2003 R2
Windows 7
Windows Server 2008
Windows Server 2012
These resources are provided by the windows
cookbook (https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/windows) and behave like any other Chef resource apart from the fact that they are platform-specific resources and have no providers on non-Windows systems. Let's take...