RHEL 8 New Features for Experienced Linux Administrators

Objectives

After completing this section, students should be able to perform tasks using Ansible Playbooks to automate common operations, using RHEL System Roles included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

System Roles in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 includes Ansible system roles to simplify automation of complex tasks, and configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux subsystems. You can run a role with an Ansible Playbook, which is a collection of Ansible plays. Each play can use a role defining it in a roles section. Plays can also include other sections as a post_tasks section to define tasks to be executed after the play's normal tasks, or a handlers section to define handlers. You can run playbooks with the ansible-playbook command included in Red Hat Ansible Engine. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 does not install Red Hat Ansible Engine by default.

Python on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Managed Hosts

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 provides Python 3.6 as the default Python implementation. There is no version of Python installed by default. If you wish to install Python on the RHEL 8 managed host, you should install the python36 Yum module.

The installed Ansible version will check if the /usr/bin/python executable exists, and look for the common system Python interpreter if it is not. Future versions of Ansible 2.x will use the lookup table first, even if the /usr/bin/python executable is present.