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

Automation of the cloud and container infrastructure


This section is more relevant to resource management than to the hosts themselves. Any of the preceding use cases can be used for either bare metal or virtual hosts that are located locally or on the cloud.

Note

The wake-on-LAN modules are less useful in a cloud or virtual environment. It is easier to manage virtual hosts and instances using the dedicated modules for their controllers.

VMware automation

In this subsection, we will look at some use cases for host management in a VMware environment, including managing the infrastructure around them.

Use case 1 – creating virtual machines from a template

This use case shows how to create virtual machines from a predefined template. After that, we make sure that all the VMs have been added to the inventory with the right parameters:

---
- name: Create a virtual machine from a template
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: False
  tasks:
    - name: Create a virtual machine
       vmware_guest:
    ...