After some discussion with Bill Nottingham I got a little further along with what it would take to integrate Ansible Tower and FreeIPA. Here are the notes from that talk.
Continue readingAnsible and FreeIPA Part 2
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Category Archives: Ansible
Ansible and FreeIPA Part-1
Ansible is a workflow engine. I use it to do work on my behalf.
FreeIPA is an identity management system. It allows me to manage the identities of users in my organization
How do I get the two things to work together? The short answer is that it is trivial to do using Ansible Engine. It is harder to do using Ansible tower.
Edit: Second part is here. Third part is coming.
Continue readingYour Own, Personal, Ansible
Me. Us. Them.
The story I tell when I explain the various offereings that Red Hat has based on Ansible follow is based on the progression of Me. Us. Them.
Me: Get my playbook working for me on my workstation. For this, I use Ansible Engine.
Us: Share my playbook with my larger team. For this, I use Ansible Tower.
Them: Make a Self service catalog for the larger organization to consume. This is where Ansible integration into other products comes in to play. I typically talk about CloudForms integration here, but Satellite and OpenShift are also capable of making use of Ansible here.
Here is how I have my local setup for doing Ansible based development. This is organized roughly around how Tower will later consume the roles and playbooks I design here.
Continue readingRemotely Provisioning a Virtual Machine using Ansible and Libvirt
Ansible exists to help automate the time consuming repeated tasks that technologist depend upon. One very common jobs is to create and tear down a virtual machine. While cloud technologies have made this possible to perform remotely, there are many times when I’ve needed to setup and tear down virtual machines on systems that were stand alone Linux servers. In this case, the main interfaces to the machine are ssh and libvirt. I recently worked through an Ansible role to setup and tear down an virtual machine via libvirt, and I’d like to walk through it, and record my reasons for some of the decisions I made.
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Creating a Job in Ansible Tower via the REST API
Now that we can use the REST API to list inventory, it is not a big stretch to decide we want to kick off Jobs, too. Here it is in a nutshell, and some related operations for working with jobs and templates.
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Using an Ansible Tower Inventory from Command Line Ansible
In an earlier post, I wrote about using the OpenStack Ansible inventory helper when calling and Ansible command line tools. However, When developing an playbook, often there is more information pulled from the inventory than just the set of hosts. Often, the inventory also collects variables that are used in common across multiple playbooks. For this reason, and many more, I want to be able to call an Ansible playbook or Ad-Hoc command from the command line, but use the inventory as defined by an Ansible Tower instance. It turns out this is fairly simple to do, using the REST API.
Using the OpenStack inventory helper for Ansible
While Tower makes it easy to manage custom inventory, I still want to develop using the command line. Thus, I want to generate a comparable smart inventory for my Ansible playbook as I get from tower.
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Ansible, Azure, and Managed Disks
Many applications have a data directory, usually due to having an embedded database. For the set I work with, this includes Red Hat IdM/FreeIPA, CloudForms/ManageIQ, Ansible Tower/AWX, and OpenShift/Kubernetes. Its enough of a pattern that I have Ansible code for pairing a set of newly allocated partitions with a set of previously built virtual machines.
Matching Create and Teardown in an Ansible Role
Nothing lasts forever. Except some developer setups that no-one seems to know who owns, and no one is willing to tear down. I’ve tried to build the code to clean up after myself into my provisioning systems. One pattern I’ve noticed is that the same data is required for building and for cleaning up a cluster. When I built Ossipee, each task had both a create and a teardown stage. I want the same from Ansible. Here is how I’ve made it work thus far.
Deploying an image on OpenStack that is bigger than the available flavors.
Today I tried to use our local OpenStack instance to deploy CloudForms Management Engine (CFME). Our OpenStack deployment has a set of flavors that all are defined with 20 GB Disks. The CFME image is larger than this, and will not deploy on the set of flavors. Here is how I worked around it.
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