I was asked at the CNUG meetup last month on Octopus Deploy on how to target Windows XP machines. At first, I didn’t have a good answer. I thought at the time the best way was to group all the Windows XP machines in an environment. After that presentation, it bugged me a little afterwards that I didn’t mention Roles.
First off, I’m not sure if tentacles can be installed on Windows XP. If anything, there is a 32-bit version of the tentacle that *might* work and if XP can support the identical PowerShell version as the Octopus Server, theoretically it could work. I may have to try this out in a virtual machine and report my findings. Granted that Windows XP is going the way of the dodo bird, it’s an important question as a similar scenario is definitely possible with other Windows OS versions. Let’s assume for the meantime that it is possible to deploy to Windows XP.
So when you’re adding a new tentacle to the Octopus server, you’ll have the option of what environment it’s assigned to and what roles to tag it with. If you want to tag servers by Operating System, it’s easy to do. Simply type the role you want to apply for that tentacle.
In Octopus Deploy, roles are effectively tags that you can assign on the fly or reuse. Once you hit save, that role is available to all other servers and future tentacles that may be installed. Roles are assigned only to machines. When doing your deployment, you can filter servers by roles to deploy to. You don’t have to specifically use the OS as a role if you don’t want to, it’s just another filter that would work in this case of targeting Windows XP machines.
I’d recommend leveraging Roles heavily if you have unique deployment scenarios where certain environments are extremely different in comparison to others such as by Operating System or server versions such as SQL Server or IIS. It’s really up to you how you want to tag and differentiate your tentacles within your environments.
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