Book Image

Linux: Powerful Server Administration

By : Jonathan Hobson, William Leemans, Uday Sawant, Oliver Pelz
Book Image

Linux: Powerful Server Administration

By: Jonathan Hobson, William Leemans, Uday Sawant, Oliver Pelz

Overview of this book

Linux servers are frequently selected over other server operating systems for their stability, security and flexibility advantages.This Learning Path will teach you how to get up and running with three of the most popular Linux server distros: Ubuntu Server, CentOS 7 Server, and RHEL 7 Server. We will begin with the Ubuntu Server and show you how to make the most of Ubuntu’s advanced functionalities. Moving on, we will provide you with all the knowledge that will give you access to the inner workings of the latest CentOS version 7. Finally, touching RHEL 7, we will provide you with solutions to common RHEL 7 Server challenges.This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: 1)Ubuntu Server Cookbook 2)CentOS 7 Linux Server Cookbook, Second Edition 3)Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Cookbook
Table of Contents (6 chapters)

Chapter 6. Orchestrating with Ansible

In this chapter, the following recipes will be addressed:

  • Installing Ansible
  • Configuring the Ansible inventory
  • Creating the template for a kickstart file
  • Creating a playbook to deploy a new VM with kickstart
  • Creating a playbook to perform system configuration tasks
  • Troubleshooting Ansible

Introduction

Ansible is an easy-to-use agentless system configuration management tool. It allows us to deploy complex configurations without the hassle of a complex interface or language.

Ansible uses playbooks, which are collections of tasks to deploy configurations and applications to multiple nodes over SSH in a controlled way. However, it doesn't stop there.

Ansible's modules, which are used to execute tasks, are all built to be idempotent in their execution.

The definition of Idempotence, according to Wikipedia, is as follows:

Idempotence (/?a?d?m'po?t?ns/ eye-d?m-poh-t?ns [citation needed]) is the property of certain operations in mathematics and...