communicator: WinRM too long (10 min) to finish Windows AMI...Is OpenSSH faster? How to implement?

Lenny Castaneda

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Feb 26, 2019, 8:00:21 PM2/26/19

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I'm creating a Packer POC to automate AMI building process for hundreds of hardened CIS windows 2016 machines and using "WinRM" as the communicator is taking too long to pack into an AMI, which is over 10 minutes to finish installing all applications/microservices. Wondering if using OpenSSH is faster?

Is anyone here familiar with using OpenSSH as the communicator instead of WinRM? If so, what are the differences? Is it a faster installation?

Jordan Borean

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Feb 27, 2019, 2:21:24 PM2/27/19

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WinRM is built into Windows and takes seconds to be configured. The 10 minutes you are seeing is Windows doing other things to initialised itself and not really related to WinRM. You will come across the same issue with SSH.

Ryan Mustard

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Feb 27, 2019, 2:27:04 PM2/27/19

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The only performance issue with WinRM that I've tried to fix is with the file provisioner. Copying a lot of files is really slow.

I use the HTTP server feature and download the files with wget.

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