hands-on lab

Using Chef Solo on Windows for Azure

Difficulty: Beginner
Duration: Up to 1 hour and 20 minutes
Students: 242
Rating: 4.7/5
Get guided in a real environmentPractice with a step-by-step scenario in a real, provisioned environment.
Learn and validateUse validations to check your solutions every step of the way.
See resultsTrack your knowledge and monitor your progress.

Description

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

Covered topics

Lab steps

Logging in to the Microsoft Azure Portal
Connecting to the Azure Virtual Machine (RDP)
Setting Up Chef Solo on Windows
Running Your First Chef Solo Recipes on Windows
Preserving Chef Resource Idempotence with Guards
Managing Chef Cookbook Dependencies with Berkshelf
Configuring Microsoft's IIS Web Server with Chef Solo - Azure