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posted by CoolHand on Monday May 11 2015, @08:37PM   Printer-friendly

The Register reports that Microsoft has released a new Powershell DSC tool to manage configuration of Linux boxes from the powershell interface. This would be similar to Puppet and friends that are used for this task today.

In yet another sign that Microsoft is a very different animal these days, the company has released PowerShell DSC (desired state configuration) for Linux.

PowerShell DSC is a server configuration tool that has hitherto driven Windows Server boxen. But Microsoft's now decided it has a “commitment to common management of heterogeneous assets in your datacenter or the public cloud”, so has added Linux-wrangling features to the tool.

The new code can cope with CentOS, Debian GNU/Linux, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu Server.

The github site for the project says:

Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) provides a configuration platform built into Windows that is based on open standards. DSC is flexible enough to function reliably and consistently in each stage of the deployment lifecycle (development, test, pre-production, production), as well as during scale-out, which is required in the cloud world.

It looks like this Powershell DSC is actually built with Python and will run on Linux, not just Windows systems with Powershell.

There have been a few signs recently that Microsoft may be becoming a bit more open and less of the MS we knew in the Gates/Ballmer eras. Is this another sign that MS is actually pursuing that trend? Or is it a bid to gain more control over the Linux-sphere? Would any Soylentils think about using this for configuration management over Puppet, Chef, cfengine, or Ansible?

 
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  • (Score: 1) by Qlaras on Tuesday May 12 2015, @04:58PM

    by Qlaras (3198) on Tuesday May 12 2015, @04:58PM (#181995)

    Microsoft has finally seen the light, and is moving to command-line utilities to manage their servers - it is the only way to reasonably scale. It IS funny to see them finally doing what the various *nixes and BSD's have done for years to decades.

    DSC is a homegrown, made-for-Windows equivalent to {Ansible,Chef,Puppet,etc}.

    Its still being fleshed out, PowerShell 4.0 included the first version of it...5.0 will have a more-complete setup with the NuGet package manager.

    I already have two Puppet stacks at work (unrelated environments) - where DSC will come in handy is on my 200+ Windows Server VMs. My test/deployment environment will be an IIS cluster; it seems to be what most have used for tests and shared info on. (Biggest part is which IIS features need to be installed, along with App Pool & Site configurations - the rest gets pushed out from TFS in our environment)

    For others, when you have a 90-95% Windows shop with a handful of Linux boxes, standing up a separate {Ansible,Chef,Puppet,etc} stack and learning that isn't worth it, DSC will fill that gap.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2015, @07:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2015, @07:56PM (#182069)

    Back in the day... [wikipedia.org]