This serves as an introduction to config.XO, outlining its purpose, advantages and important features.
Configuration Management (config.XO) is an extended implementation of Microsoft PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC), an essential part of the configuration, management and maintenance of Windows and Linux nodes. It allows specifying the configuration of a node using a declarative model in a simple and standardized way that is easy to maintain and understand.
With config.XO, infrastructure is defined as code, ensuring a consistent configuration, versioning and testability. Servers and clients managed by config.XO are continuously evaluated against their desired state. Furthermore, Configuration Management takes care of configuration drifts and ensures that they’re corrected automatically and that all configured configuration changes are applied wherever they’re assigned.
It doesn’t matter if you’re using DSC on servers or on your workstations.
🎥: Watch our YouTube video for a visual walkthrough
Key features #
- Create and ensure standardized configurations and assign them to groups or individual hosts
- The desired state is continuously evaluated and corrected as needed – to allow a consistent configuration
- Customizable code for flexibility – create your own configurations or modules and apply them where needed
- Painless migration and management by integrating the solution in a small scope of hosts side by side and moving further at your own pace
- Replicate the code base and assign it to multiple infrastructures to design a repeatable and immutable infrastructure. You can assign the same set of configurations to your on-premises nodes or nodes running in public clouds
- Implement code testing tools to automatically test the outcome of your configurations
- Replace manual infrastructure configuration and provisioning by using the desired state configuration language; it’s designed to be human-readable and easy to understand, write and extend
- Enable cloud adoption by leveraging the cloud’s on-demand infrastructure with a robust and easy-to-use configuration management system. The infrastructure automatically scales with your progress of integrating more hosts into the solution
- On-premises support – it doesn’t matter if you have your own data center or if you’re running your workloads completely in the cloud. We support many environments that are reachable by network
Use cases #
- Complete configuration management of Microsoft Windows infrastructure services
- Uncomplicated configuration management of Windows clients and desktops
- Replace group policies and configure VMs without Active Directory connection (e.g. DMZ VMs)
- Install and configure Windows features
- Use our intuitive frontend to deliver PowerShell DSC to your IT staff
- Run package installations during configuration management runs (with application.XO based on PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit)
Top benefits #
- Simplify infrastructure tasks by configuring one or more nodes automatically
- Configure all nodes within a role identically
- Avoid drift of configurations over time
- Automate the deployment on demand or “en masse”, fully automated and independent of the location of a node
