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 client node configuration


As well as Linux hosts, Ansible is capable of remotely managing Microsoft Windows hosts. This includes Windows Desktop 7, 8, and 10, and Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, and 2016.

The Windows clients require you to have some specific versions of the following applications installed:

  • PowerShell 3.0 or higher
  • .NET 4.0

Those two requirements are met on most Windows releases, except for Window 7 and Windows server 2008.

There is an Ansible-made PowerShell script that can carry out an automatic installation of the missing requirements that can be found at the following link: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Ansible-QuickStart-Guide/blob/master/Chapter2/Upgrade_Powershell.ps1.

To be able to execute this script, or any other third-party script, we need to change the execution policy from restricted to unrestricted, run our script, and then turn the policy back to restricted. Using Windows PowerShell, run the following using local or domain administrator...