Recently I’ve been tasked to come up with a VPN solution which must support:

• All major desktop and mobile OSes as clients
• Clients behind NAT
• Mikrotik RouterOS as a client
• Site-to-site and remote access VPNs

This is the final entry in the series. In this post, I want to show how Ansible can be used to automate Windows VM provisioning. As always all the scripts and configurations are available at my GitHub repository.

In the first entry of this series I showed how to create VM templates using Packer. Now we can use those templates to spin up actual VMs with help of Terraform.

In this series of posts I’d like to show how to automate the process of setting up virtual infrastructure consisting of several Windows Server 2016 machines. Most articles I’ve come across cover the use of cloud providers (e.g. AWS) as a virtualization platform, so I decided to make a write up about my experience with VMware vSphere. The whole process can be devided in three stages:

1. Prepare VM template
2. Deploy the desired number of VMs using template from the previous step
3. Configure those VMs with Ansible