ccdc.vagrant-base-box

An Ansible role to perform some provisioning on virtual machines for exporting as Vagrant base boxes.

What does this role do?

• [Windows] Rearrange drives so hard drives are clustered from C: onwards and optical drives after them
• [Windows] Install all available system updates
• [Windows] Precompile .NET assemblies
• [Windows] Set PowerShell execution policy to RemoteSigned
• [Windows] Disable password expiration for vagrant user
• [Windows] Set all network connections to be Private by default
• [Windows] Enable access to the VM via RDP
• [Windows] Enable access to the VM via SSH (Windows Server only)
• [Windows] Enable User Account Control
• [Windows] Set power management plan to High Performance

Requirements

For provisioning Windows VMs, this role requires the [community.windows](https://galaxy.ansible.com/community/windows) collection.

Role Variables

Most of the variables for this role are simple booleans to determine which customization tasks should be run; the only task with complex variables controlling its behaviour is the task to rearrange the system's drives (see below).

Variable	Default value	Comments
update_windows	true	Whether or not to install any available operating system updates.
precompile_dotnet	true	Whether or not to precompile .NET assemblies.
target_execution_policy	RemoteSigned	The execution policy to set. Set this to an empty string to skip.
disable_vagrant_password_expiry	true	Whether to disable password expiration for the vagrant user.
disable_network_location_prompt	true	Whether to disable network type prompt on new network connections.
set_all_networks_private	true	Whether to set all current network connections to be "Private".
enable_rdp	true	Whether to set the system up to allow access via RDP.
enable_ssh	true	Whether to set the system up to allow access via SSH.
add_vagrant_ssh_pubkey	true	Add the default Vagrant SSH public key to vagrant's authorized_keys.
enable_uac	true	Whether to enable User Account Control.
power_plan	High performance	The Windows power management plan to set. Set to an empty string to skip.

Rearrange hard drives

This task will rearrange all hard drives as per a given specification and then sort all optical drives to after the final hard drive.

Variable	Default	Comments
rearrange_drives	true	Whether or not to rearrange drives. Set to false to skip the entire task.
initialize_disks	see below	Disks to bring online/offline on Windows Server.
drive_configuration	see below	A list of mappings of drive labels to their desired letters.

Default values for drive_configuration

At the CCDC, Windows build machines have two drives in addition to the system drive. These are assigned drive letters as per this specification:

drive_configuration:
  - letter: d
    label: scratch
    number: 1
    online: true
    readonly: false
  - letter: e
    label: builds
    number: 2
    online: true
    readonly: false

You can similarly assign specific drive letters to any drives you've specified in your VM configuration and formatted using the <DiskConfiguration> section in your Windows autounattend.xml file.

The number, online and readonly fields in the drive_configuration section apply only to Windows Server targets; on these systems the drive configuration task will use the drive number to ensure the relevant drive is online and read-only as specified here. This is because on e.g. VMWare guests, disks are often connected via the pvscsi driver which Windows Server assumes makes them SAN volumes and causes it to set them up as offline by default.

Please note that offline drives cannot be reassigned to new drive letters, so if you wish to specify drive letters on Windows Server you must set the drive to be online, not read-only and specify its drive number.