Book Image

Ansible for Real-Life Automation

By : Gineesh Madapparambath
Book Image

Ansible for Real-Life Automation

By: Gineesh Madapparambath

Overview of this book

Get ready to leverage the power of Ansible’s wide applicability to automate and manage IT infrastructure with Ansible for Real-Life Automation. This book will guide you in setting up and managing the free and open source automation tool and remote-managed nodes in the production and dev/staging environments. Starting with its installation and deployment, you’ll learn automation using simple use cases in your workplace. You’ll go beyond just Linux machines to use Ansible to automate Microsoft Windows machines, network devices, and private and public cloud platforms such as VMWare, AWS, and GCP. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll integrate Ansible into your DevOps workflow and deal with application container management and container platforms such as Kubernetes. This Ansible book also contains a detailed introduction to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help you get up to speed with Red Hat AAP and integration with CI/CD and ITSM. What’s more, you’ll implement efficient automation solutions while learning best practices and methods to secure sensitive data using Ansible Vault and alternatives to automate non-supported platforms and operations using raw commands, command modules, and REST API calls. By the end of this book, you’ll be proficient in identifying and developing real-life automation use cases using Ansible.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Using Ansible as Your Automation Tool
6
Part 2: Finding Use Cases and Integrations
16
Part 3: Managing Your Automation Development Flow with Best Practices

Automating VMware vSphere resources using Ansible

We will start with some simple automation use cases for VMware, such as provisioning of virtual machines, managing high availability (HA), network creation, and managing snapshots. The Ansible VMware collection (community.vmware) contains around 150 modules and other plugins:

Figure 7.6 – Ansible VMware collection by the community

The community.vmware collection relies on the pyvmomi and vSphere Automation SDK for Python libraries. Hence, to use the community.vmware collection, you need to install appropriate packages for Ansible to use it.

VMware has already introduced the vSphere REST API for vSphere 6.0 and later. A new Ansible collection was introduced (vmware.vmware_rest) to manage the operations using a REST API instead of Python libraries and SDKs. vmware.vmware_rest contains around 130 modules and other plugins:

Figure 7.7 – Ansible VMware REST API collection by...