Configuration Management

About config.XO

config.XO is an extended implementation of Microsoft PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) which is 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. Configuration Management takes care of configuration drifts and ensures that these drifts are corrected automatically and that all configured configuration changes are applied wherever they are assigned.

We empower all our customers to achieve the complete automation of a configuration and their infrastructure components.

It does not matter if you are using DSC on servers or on your workstations.

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 and 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 move 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 is designed to be human-readable, easy to understand and easy to be written and extended.

  • Enable cloud adoption by Leveraging the clouds on-demand infrastructure with a robust and easy to use configuration management system. The infrastructure automatically scales with your progress of integrating more and more hosts to the solution.

  • On-Premises support: It does not matter if you have your own data center or if you are 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)

Why should I use Desired State Configuration?

Configuration management at scale, whether to align nodes to an organizational policy or to enable continuous deployment can be a tedious and error-prone process. As an organization’s infrastructure footprint grows, so does its difficulties in this area, with common questions such as:

  • How to ensure that all hosts are matching their intended configuration and remain in the correct state?

  • How to prevent node configuration from drifting from the desired state, due to changes made by people, processes, and applications?

  • How to ensure new nodes match the configuration of existing ones in the same infrastructure role?

  • How to seamlessly set a desired configuration for all or a subset of my nodes?

  • How to orchestrate configuration changes without impacting uptime?

  • How to achieve all of the above, across on-premises nodes and those in public clouds, even on Windows and Linux?

Main Advantages

  • 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 independent of the location of a node

How to use config.XO?

Using config.XO, ensuring nodes match an intended desired state is incredibly simple. You write and import a PowerShell DSC Configuration specifying the desired state that nodes should match, upload it to config.XO and assign it to nodes and node groups.

You don’t have to care about compiling the configuration. This is done automatically during the upload phase.

The next chapters describe how to work with the frontend, how to create simple configurations and how to extend the function set with your own modules and composite resources.

Supported Environments

The Configuration Management module can be used with on-premises virtual machines (VM), physical host or a VM in any public cloud, as long as the node has internet access. A proxy configuration is possible as well.

Supported Windows Operating System Versions

The following versions are supported:

  • Windows Server 2022

  • Windows Server 2019

  • Windows Server 2016

  • Windows 11

  • Windows 10