Using Chef Solo on Windows for Azure

Lab Overview

Chef is a popular configuration management tool. It has built-in support for Windows and a thriving community providing convenient cookbooks for managing Windows configurations. This Lab will get you up and running with Chef Solo and help you configure a local Windows host on Azure using Chef. You will then explore Chef cookbook dependencies and the Chocolatey Windows package manager. Finally, you will configure the host to serve an Internet Information Services (IIS) website.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

• Install and set up Chef Solo on an Azure Windows VM
• Run Chef recipes with Windows-specific resources
• Use guards to enforce Chef resource idempotence
• Manage Chef cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf
• Configure Microsoft's IIS web server with Chef Solo 

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with the following:

• Chef concepts
• Working at the command line
• Windows and PowerShell experience are beneficial, but not required

Lab Environment

Before completing the lab instructions, the environment will look as follows:

After completing the lab instructions, the environment should look similar to:

Updates

May 17th, 2023 - Updated the validation check function to migrate to Azure

May 5th, 2020 - Added a validation check function to check the work done in the lab