If you are a frequent reader of this blog you will have seen Hart’s posts about “Cooking with Chef”:

• Part one: Introduction to Chef
• Part two: Cookbooks and Deploying with Knife
• Part three: Installing your own Open Source Chef

Further to these there are also a lot of tutorials on the internet. Most of them seem to focus on using chef to deploy/manage Linux servers but you will have a hard time to find a lot for doing the same on Windows Servers (Yes, Windows as in Microsoft Windows).

I have therefore sat down and put together a detailed step-by-step walkthrough that will guide you through installing your own Open Source Chef Server on a Rackspace Cloud Server running CentOS 6.4, installing the knife-windows plugin and then spinning up, bootstrapping and installing IIS on a Windows Server 2012 Rackspace Cloud Server without logging on to it once. Read on, if you dare…