Configuring Cumulus Networks switches with Ansible
Cumulus Linux (created by Cumulus Networks, which was acquired by NVIDIA) is an open source network operating system that can run on a variety of bare metal switches, offering an open source approach to data center networking. This is a great leap forward for network design and a significant shift away from the proprietary models of the past. They offer a free version of their software that will run on the hypervisor of your choice for test and evaluation purposes called Cumulus VX. The examples in this section are based on Cumulus VX version 4.4.0.
Defining our inventory
A quick bit of research shows us that Cumulus VX will use the standard SSH transport method of Ansible. Since it is a Linux distribution designed specifically to run on switch hardware, it is capable of running in remote execution mode, so it does not require the ansible.netcommon.network_cli
protocol. Furthermore, just one module has been defined...