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Ansible Quick Start Guide
Ansible Quick Start Guide

Ansible Quick Start Guide: Control and monitor infrastructures of any size, physical or virtual

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Ansible Quick Start Guide

Ansible Setup and Configuration

As Ansible is agentless, unlike other configuration management platforms, it only requires a master node installation. Ansible is also particularly light due to its lack of daemons, database reliance, and keep-on-running services.

Following our introduction to Ansible, we are now going to look at different ways of installing Ansible in your environment, such as bare-metal, in the cloud, and the use of Docker containers. We will also look at how to install Ansible on multiple Linux operating systems, both from a package manager and from the source. Finally, we will look at how to prepare and configure a host so that it is Ansible-controllable. This chapter will cover the following:

  • Ansible master nodes and basic Linux installation
  • Ansible container setup
  • Ansible source installation
  • Ansible AWS instance setup
  • Ansible configuration...

Ansible master node installation

Ansible uses Secure Shell (SSH) and WinRM to manage its host clients. All installation happens on either the management node or the master node, or possibly on multiple nodes when redundancy is needed. We will proceed into the installation of Ansible from source, as with Python PyPI on two major Linux families: Debian (which includes Debian, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu Mate) and Red Hat (which includes Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, and Scientific Linux). We will also be looking at the Ansible installation process for Mac OS X, Python PyPI, and how to install it from the source. We will cover cloud usage and containerized Ansible.

If you have a choice, we recommend using the default package manager for Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. Using the package manager allows the installation of the latest stable version...

Master node essential configuration

The Ansible configuration is mainly stored in the ansible.cfg configuration file, which is usually located in /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg in most system package managers and the Python PyPI installation. It may also be located in the home directory of the user who installed Ansible, or whichever location the ANSIBLE_CONFIG environment variable is pointing to. In this section, we will be covering the most useful configuration that can be altered using Ansible to make your life easier.

Open your ansible.cfg file using your favorite text editor, either in CLI mode (using vi or nano) or with a GUI (using Gedit or Atom):

sudo nano /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
There is no need to worry about which text editor you are using—there will always be someone who disagrees with you. Use whichever one you are most comfortable with.

Many would...

Linux client node configuration

The only important tool that is required to be installed and running on the client machine is  the OpenSSH-server. All new releases of Linux use SSH as the main remote access method by default.

To make sure that everything is in place, the SSH service should always be running and the system's firewall should allow a port for SSH to service through. By default, this is port 22. This can be changed, however, and this change should be also noted in the host Ansible inventory.

For Linux clients, any extra configuration for Ansible management is more aimed at following best practice guidelines than being strictly necessary. Extra configuration can be a way to make sure that the remote clients managed by Ansible are fully automated, securely accessible, and do not require an admin intervention when running automated tasks.

The following...

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...

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at how to prepare the environment for multiple systems in order to be able to install Ansible. We also considered which configuration options were most useful in either Linux or Windows. Now that we've learned how to set up and configure Ansible, we're ready to start learning about its functional features. In the following chapter, we will be covering Ansible playbooks and inventory to better understand how orchestration works.

References

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Key benefits

  • Create and use Ansible Playbook to script and organise management tasks
  • Benefit from the Ansible community roles and modules to resolve complex and niche tasks
  • Write configuration management code to automate infrastructure

Description

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.

Who is this book for?

This book is targeted at System Administrators and Network Administrators who want to use Ansible to automate an infrastructure. No knowledge of Ansible is required.

What you will learn

  • Implement Playbook YAML scripts and its capacities to simplify day-to-day tasks
  • Setup Static and Dynamic Inventory
  • Use Ansible predefined modules for Linux, Windows, networking, and virtualisation administration
  • Organize and configure the host filesystem using storage and files modules
  • Implement Ansible to enable infrastructure automated configuration management
  • Simplify infrastructure administration
  • Search and install new roles and enable them within Ansible
  • Secure your data using Ansible Vault

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Sep 28, 2018
Length: 214 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781789532937
Vendor :
Red Hat
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Product Details

Publication date : Sep 28, 2018
Length: 214 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781789532937
Vendor :
Red Hat
Languages :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
What is Ansible? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Ansible Setup and Configuration Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Ansible Inventory and Playbook Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Ansible Modules Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Ansible Automated Infrastructure Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Ansible Coding for Configuration Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Ansible Galaxy and Community Roles Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Ansible Advanced Features Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7
(3 Ratings)
5 star 66.7%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 33.3%
xamnx Jun 25, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Très bon bouquin pour mettre un pied dans Ansible.Compréhensible même pour un administrateur système (pas de grande notion de développement à avoir).Genial
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Jeff McCarty May 16, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Quick delivery and easy to read.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Virginia Mike Nov 15, 2019
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
I've been coding for 3 decades using most languages on most platforms. Been heavy into DevOps for 2 years using Puppet extensively and Chef for a few projects. After reading thru the whole book, I am sorry to say but I cannot recommend it. It is more of a "type this and you should see that" book. Very light on explanations. The biggest disappointment was the chapter on playbooks (the most fundamental construct in Ansible) was given barely 15 pages and did not go into near enough detail to be useful in actually writing playbooks. I picked up this book because it was one of the most recent and I thought it would be the most up to date. There are better Ansible books out there if you need more that a light overview.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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