IBM is excited to announce the general availability of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform running on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE! Back in June of 2023, Kara Todd Vice President of the IBM Z Application Platform announced the Technology and Developer preview availability of specific Ansible Automation Platform components running on IBM Z and LinuxONE. Today we the full Ansible Automation Platform with all of its components supported across the IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE environment.
With official s390x(IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE architecture) support coming to Ansible Automation Platform, now mainframe clients have the deployment flexibility to run the Ansible Automation Platform and developer tooling on:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Z & LinuxONE
- Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z & LinuxONE
- IBM zCX Foundation for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z
- IBM z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) on IBM Z
For full details on the official Red Hat announcement see the Red Hat blog. There is also a separate blog about the Power support here.
Why Ansible Automation Platform on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE?
Why is this announcement important for mainframe clients to be aware of? In most cases, companies that have an IBM mainframe are already using Ansible or have deployed Ansible Automation Platform but are not using it with IBM Z or IBM LinuxONE systems yet, and that deployment does not sit within the mainframe environment. Therefore if your company already has a subscription for Ansible Automation Platform and has it deployed, work with your company to understand if the mainframe group can be onboarded on to the existing Ansible Automation Platform deployment. This allows the mainframe teams to focus on writing and managing their Ansible playbooks, instead of having to be responsible for being Ansible Automation Platform administrators. For other teams, it allows them to leverage one platform to manage their environments going forward while still leveraging the existing tooling through Ansible Automation Platform. Multiple Ansible Automation Platform deployments within a company are not recommended, they would continue to silo the mainframe environment from the rest of IT. This allows the mainframe teams to focus on writing and managing their Ansible playbooks, instead of having to be responsible for being Ansible Automation Platform administrators. For clients who either do not have Ansible Automation Platform, or are not able to connect their distributed based Ansible environment to their mainframe, this new s390x deployment availability provides the flexibility to host Ansible Automation Platform within your IBM Z or IBM LinuxONE environment.
Clients who have already deployed an Ansible Automation Platform environment on distributed or cloud systems now have the flexibility to drive Ansible automation execution from their IBM Z or IBM LinuxONE systems through automation mesh and execution environments. These solutions allow you to target environments outside of your automation controller to drive Ansible Playbook, job template and workflow execution. To dive deeper into execution environments and setting up an automation mesh across your automation controller and IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE hosts, check out this blog from Ian Wright from Mainline. The Ansible blog and Ansible YouTube channel also provide a wealth of information.
To learn more about what you can do with Ansible Automation Platform on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE check out this blog.
If you are looking to deploy Ansible Automation Platform or execution environments on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE, make sure you download the s390x version of Ansible Automation Platform. The suggested place to obtain the s390x deployment for Ansible Automation Platform is here. Supported execution environments for s390x can also be found:
For any clients interested in learning more about deploying or using Ansible Automation Platform on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE, there are many resources available to help you get started! Red Hat provides many self-paced labs designed to provide hands-on experience with the different components and integrations of Ansible Automation Platform. IBM and the Washington Systems Center(WSC) have also launched the Ansible Automation Platform for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE Wildfire Workshop, allowing users to get hands-on experience with Ansible Automation Platform running on IBM LinuxONE, automating tasks on both Linux on IBM Z and z/OS systems. To find a Wildfire Workshop near you, view or request a workshop here.
Stay up to date with Ansible Automation Platform for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE
To stay up to date with the Ansible for IBM Z community, join the IBM Z & IBM LinuxONE community topic group for Ansible for IBM Z. If you want to join our Ansible for IBM Z Community Guild monthly calls, where the IBM Z team and Ansible users share roadmaps on content, use-cases, and collaborate on Ansible adoption, fill out this survey.
Here are some additional resources to help you get started automating with Ansible Automation Platform for z/OS: