Technical requirements

This chapter assumes that you have set up your control host with Ansible, as detailed in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Ansible, and are using the most recent version available – the examples in this chapter were tested with Ansible 2.15. This chapter also assumes that you have at least one additional host to test against; ideally, this should be Linux-based. Since this chapter is network device-centric, we understand that not everyone will have access to specific networking equipment to test on (for example, Cisco switches).

Where examples are given, and you have access to such devices, please feel free to explore the examples. However, if you do not have access to any network hardware, we will give an example using the freely available Cumulus VX, which offers a fully-featured demo of Cumulus Networks’ switching environment. Although we will give specific examples of hostnames in this chapter, you are free to substitute them with your hostname...