Connecting to network devices

As we have seen, there are some peculiarities in Ansible networking, so specific configurations are required.

To manage network devices with Ansible, you need to have at least one to test on. Let’s assume we have a Cisco IOS system available to us. It is accepted that not everyone will have such a device to test on, so the following is offered as a hypothetical example only.

Going by the https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/network/user_guide/platform_index.html page, we can see that the correct ansible_network_os for this device is cisco.ios.ios and that we can connect to it using both network_cli and local. Since local is deprecated, we are going to use network_cli. Follow these steps to configure Ansible so that you can manage IOS devices:

1. First, let’s create the inventory file with our devices in the routers group:

   [routers]
   n1.example.org
   n2.example.org
   [cumulusvx]
   vx01.example.org

2. To know which connection parameters...