Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

By : Bassem Aly
Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

By: Bassem Aly

Overview of this book

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python starts by covering the set up of a Python environment to perform automation tasks, as well as the modules, libraries, and tools you will be using. We’ll explore examples of network automation tasks using simple Python programs and Ansible. Next, we will walk you through automating administration tasks with Python Fabric, where you will learn to perform server configuration and administration, along with system administration tasks such as user management, database management, and process management. As you progress through this book, you’ll automate several testing services with Python scripts and perform automation tasks on virtual machines and cloud infrastructure with Python. In the concluding chapters, you will cover Python-based offensive security tools and learn how to automate your security tasks. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the skills of automating several system administration tasks with Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Creating and Managing VMware Virtual Machines

For a long long time, virtualization has been an important technology in the IT industry as it provides an efficient way for hardware resources and allows us to easily manage application life cycle inside the Virtual Machine (VM). In 2001, VMware released the first version of the ESXi that could run directly over the commodity off the shelf (COTS) server while converting it to a resource that could be consumed by multiple separate virtual machines. In this chapter, we will explore many options available to automate the building of virtual machine thanks to Python and Ansible.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Setting up the lab environment
  • Generating a VMX file using Jinja2
  • VMware Python clients
  • Using Ansible playbooks to manage instances