How to connect Ansible to Windows VM via Azure managed identity

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1

Hi,

at present im trying to do the deployment in Windows VM’s via ansible and the connection is happening via SSH with specific ansible user credentials.

Is there a way to connect Ansible to Windows VM via Managed identity?.

this is my host file at the moment with dedicated user credentials.

[windows]
xx.xx.xx.xx

[windows:vars]
ansible_user=ansible user
ansible_password=virtualmachine passowrd
ansible_connection=ssh
ansible_shell_type=cmd
ansible_ssh_common_args=-o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
ansible_ssh_retries=3
ansible_become_method=runas

2

Hi Mahesh,

I’m assuming you’re using Azure. The issue you’re going to run into is that a Managed Identity is used for Azure control plane authentication (ARM), not OS authentication. There is a Microsoft Azure Resource Manager credential type if you’re in AWX but that will take in either username/password or App Registration and secret (not Managed Identity).

10. Credentials — Ansible AWX community documentation

On a side note, I am curious how your experience has been with using SSH to Windows. My understanding was that there were limitations with the modules and the support was somewhat experimental. WinRM has been a bane of my existence but it looked like SSH on Windows was going to just be a difference headache.

Best regards,

Joe