Remote Control of dynamically created Windows VM

[Francois Marot]

Hello all,

I'd like your advice on dynamically created Windows instance (through the "Cloud VSphere Plugin" but whatever). It's not directly Jenkins-related but maybe you have advice on tool/plugins to use with Jenkins.

How can we then control the newly instanciated Windows to deploy and run software onto it ?
(Let's call "master Jenkins" the Jenkins instance that has run the "Cloud VSphere Plugin").

• pre configured Jenkins Slave.

base Windows image would contains a Jenkins Slave that connects on startup to the "master Jenkins".
Is there a problem ? Limited to one slave ? We'd like to have dynamic slave creation.

• use an automation tool/server directly installed in the base image (Ansible ? Chef ? Puppet ?)

• connect through powershell remoting capabilities (WinRM ?) ? The baseImage would have to be pre-configured to allow WinRM connections.

It seems to me that WinRM is the way to go, but do you have any advice to remote control dynamically created Windows boxes ?

One last note: the goal is in the end to run the installation and auto-tests of *graphical* (as in non-headless) software.

Regards,
Francois