Red Hat Ansible for Network Automation
Which system acts as the control node at example.com?
The management workstation is your base of operations on the example.com management network.
It makes sense that this system will be a control node.
There can be more than one control node, but it makes sense for a number of reasons to keep the number of control nodes small enough to be manageable.
Red Hat Ansible Tower has features that make it easier to safely and securely share a control node.
In order to automate the management of networking devices with Ansible, it is necessary to first install Ansible.
In this exercise, you will install Ansible on the control node, which in this case is the student workstation machine.
Outcomes
You should be able to:
Install Ansible.
Verify that the desired version was installed.
Open a terminal window on the workstation machine.
Note that you may need to enable opening pop-up windows in order for the workstation session to begin.
Log in to the workstation VM as user student with password student.
If you are ever in need of passwords, they are all listed in Appendix B, Connection and Authentication Variables.
Install Ansible. This installation installs a python library (
python-netaddr) to support the advanced use of IP addresses later in the exercise.[student@workstation ~]$sudo yum install ansible python-netaddrVerify that version 2.5 or later is installed.
[student@workstation ~]$ansible --versionansible 2.5.5 config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg configured module search path = [u'/home/student/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules'] ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible executable location = /usr/bin/ansible python version = 2.7.5 (default, Feb 20 2018, 09:19:12) [GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-28)]
This concludes the guided exercise.
