Book Image

Learn Ansible

By : Russ McKendrick
Book Image

Learn Ansible

By: Russ McKendrick

Overview of this book

Ansible has grown from a small, open source orchestration tool to a full-blown orchestration and configuration management tool owned by Red Hat. Its powerful core modules cover a wide range of infrastructures, including on-premises systems and public clouds, operating systems, devices, and services—meaning it can be used to manage pretty much your entire end-to-end environment. Trends and surveys say that Ansible is the first choice of tool among system administrators as it is so easy to use. This end-to-end, practical guide will take you on a learning curve from beginner to pro. You'll start by installing and configuring the Ansible to perform various automation tasks. Then, we'll dive deep into the various facets of infrastructure, such as cloud, compute and network infrastructure along with security. By the end of this book, you'll have an end-to-end understanding of Ansible and how you can apply it to your own environments.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

An introduction to VMware

VMware has a nearly 20-year history, from a stealth start-up to being owned by Dell and acquired by EMC, with a revenue of $7.92 billion. There are around 30 products currently available in the VMware product portfolio; the most commonly known ones are its hypervisors, of which there are two different types.

The first hypervisor, VMware ESXi, is a type 1 that runs directly on hardware using the instruction sets found in most modern 64-bit Intel and AMD CPUs. Its original type 2 hypervisor does not require virtualization instructions to be present within the CPU like they need to be in type 1. It was formally known as GSX; this hypervisor pre-dates the type 1 hypervisor, meaning that it can support much older CPUs.

VMware is extremely commonplace in most enterprises; it allows administrators to quickly deploy virtual machines across numerous standard x86...