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 network modules


Network device management has never been easier than with Ansible. Having a playbook, a unified language for all modules makes the management of proprietary network devices very simple and does not require you to learn vendor-specific tools and coding languages. Network administration is now part of the automated configuration management strategy.

This is a list of network proprietary devices currently supported by Ansible: Arista, Avi Networks, Cisco, Citrix NetScaler, Cumulus, Dell EMC, F5, Huawei, Infoblox, Juniper, Nokia, Mellanox, Lenovo, Palo Alto Networks, and Pluribus. We will not be able to cover all the modules that control these—this would probably require a book of its own!

Note

Being agentless, Ansible uses SSH and HTTPS to communicate with devices.

For this section, we will only cover the Cisco standard devices. We need to create a special inventory for them:

[ciscosw]
switch0            ansible_hosts=192.168.10.250
switch1            ansible_hosts=192.168...