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

Windows infrastructure automation


Using Ansible playbooks, it is just as easy to automate a Windows infrastructure as it is to automate a Linux one. In this section, we are going to explore some use cases in which we are going to automate some Windows administration tasks.

Note

These use cases are tested on Windows 10. Extra configurations may be required to make them run on Windows 7 or 8.

System management automation

In this subsection, we are going to focus on use cases related to the management of the Windows system.

Use case 1 – system update automation

This use case tackles the automation of Windows host systems and some application updates. We are going to make updates restricted to what the playbook asks the hosts to do by disabling auto update and only updating the permitted categories:

---
- name: Windows updates management
  hosts: windows
  gather_facts: yes
  tasks:
   - name: Create the registry path for Windows Updates
     win_regedit:
       path: HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft...