Introduction
Ansible has been out there for some time now and I spent some time with it a few years back. Nothing advanced but I remember I found it a lot cooler than Chef and Puppet. To begin with it should be fairly simple: A setup of a server and a couple of clients. I would then go through a few tasks that I have found makes good practice and also some “adjustments” on the Ansible server that you might find handy. Technically it does not need to be a server. Ansible can easily run on a user PC and just connect to the Ansible clients when needing to run a deployment/configuration change.
I have been involved in a project for some time now, where we are using Ansible. I found it as a good opportunity to dive into Ansible a bit again. The reason why I like Ansible is, it is so easy to setup and the documentation is fantastic. Most things are well described and there are quite good examples.
Below I’ve split the posts into areas regarding setup and configuration of Ansible itself and further down I have put some things on VMware. Since Ansible is very powerful with networking, and that is an area of interest to me, I suspect that some posts will sooner or later appear in a new section too.
Anyway, enough with the intro, lets get started:
The hosts file and verifying Ansible works
Now the real thing I wanted to play with is of course VMware and what I can do with VMware. So here goes:
VMware with Ansible – vCenter deployment
Creating a dvSwitch (for vSAN) via Ansible
ESXi Configuration with Ansible
Ansible and Windows… Managing the beast some simple steps