win_package - Installing MSI Succeeds, But ConnectionError Thrown Before Program is Listed in Control Panel about ansible.windows

[jborean93]

There's nothing we can do here, the Windows Admin Center install is bouncing the WinRM service which stops the the win_package module from reporting back it's status, in reality it actually kills the win_package module because it's a child process of the WinRM process. The docs for Install Windows Admin Center even state

Installing Windows Admin Center will restart the WinRM service, which will sever all remote PowerShells sessions

It does go onto to you can add the parameter/argument RESTART_WINRM=0 to stop that behaviour and manually bounce that service another way for Windows Admin Center to function. What you should do is reboot after a change was detected like so

- name: Install WAC
  win_package:
    path: C:\Users\Administrator\Downloads\WindowsAdminCenter1910.2.msi
    state: present
    arguments: >-
      SME_PORT=443
      SSL_CERTIFICATE_OPTION=generate
      RESTART_WINRM=0
  register: wac_install

# WAC needs to restart the WinRM service, only sane way of handling that in Ansible that uses WinRM is to use win_reboot to reboot the host
- name: Reboot after installing WAC
  win_reboot:
  when: wac_install is changed

I also changed the arguments from using a list to a string as the list conversion doesn't work too well for MSI packages. If reboot a host isn't viable for you then you could try and restart the WinRM service through async in a separate task. Unfortunately it won't be as stable as doing a reboot as that win_reboot action plugin handles things like the host not being reachable which is hard to do in a separate task.