Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By : Mohamed Alibi
Book Image

Ansible Quick Start Guide

By: Mohamed Alibi

Overview of this book

Configuration Management (CM) tools help administrators reduce their workload. Ansible is one of the best Configuration Management tools, and can act as an orchestrator for managing other CMs. This book is the easiest way to learn how to use Ansible as an orchestrator and a Configuration Management tool. With this book, you will learn how to control and monitor computer and network infrastructures of any size,physical or virtual. You will begin by learning about the Ansible client-server architecture. To get started, you will set up and configure an Ansible server. You will then go through the major features of Ansible: Playbook and Inventory. Then, we will look at Ansible systems and network modules. You will then use Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management, followed by best practices for using Ansible roles and community modules. Finally, you will explore Ansible features such as Ansible Vault, Ansible Containers, and Ansible plugins.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Ansible cloud modules


Ansible has made managing virtualized and on cloud infrastructures very easy. It has over 300 modules that run several APIs designed to cover a variety of cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, and Linode. These modules manage multiple aspects of the environment, including the hosts' operating systems, network connectivity, compute resources, and hosts provisioning.

Note

When using Ansible modules with a cloud or virtual environment, it is recommended that you use a dynamic inventory for better management.

VMware modules

Ansible offers a list of modules to enable VMware infrastructure automated management.

We need to have the pyVmomi Python SDK installed:

pip install pyvmomi

These modules are built to manage the VMware ESX, ESXi, and vCenter server. In this section, we will describe some of the most useful modules that are involved in managing the VMware infrastructure.

An inventory file is required to...