Book Image

Learn Ansible

By : Russ McKendrick
Book Image

Learn Ansible

By: Russ McKendrick

Overview of this book

Ansible has grown from a small, open source orchestration tool to a full-blown orchestration and configuration management tool owned by Red Hat. Its powerful core modules cover a wide range of infrastructures, including on-premises systems and public clouds, operating systems, devices, and services—meaning it can be used to manage pretty much your entire end-to-end environment. Trends and surveys say that Ansible is the first choice of tool among system administrators as it is so easy to use. This end-to-end, practical guide will take you on a learning curve from beginner to pro. You'll start by installing and configuring the Ansible to perform various automation tasks. Then, we'll dive deep into the various facets of infrastructure, such as cloud, compute and network infrastructure along with security. By the end of this book, you'll have an end-to-end understanding of Ansible and how you can apply it to your own environments.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

An example playbook

Before we complete this chapter, I am going to share an example playbook I wrote for deploying a small number of virtual machines in a VMware cluster. The idea with the project was to launch seven virtual machines into a customer's network which are as follows:

  • One Linux jump host
  • One NTP server
  • One load balancer
  • Two web servers
  • Two database servers

The VMs all had to be built from an existing template; unfortunately, this template was built with a hardcoded gateway IP address of 192.168.1.254 in the /etc/sysconfig/network file. This meant that for these machines to correctly appear on the network, I had to make changes to each of the virtual machines once they had been launched.

I started off by setting up a file called vmware.yml in my group_vars folder; this contained the information needed to connect to my VMware installation and also the default...