Learn Ansible on IBM Power and AIX with our hands-on course

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Learn Ansible on IBM Power and AIX with our hands-on course

By Chris Gibson posted 22 days ago

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Ansible on IBM Power Workshop

Accelerate your Power automation journey with technical training from IBM

By Chris Gibson and Upendra Rajan

Introduction:

The IBM Power Technical Training team have been working hard on an exciting and new Ansible on Power course. The course is designed to help Power clients get up to speed quickly with Ansible, so they can start automating their Power server environments.

We are very happy to announce that this course is now available!

Ansible on IBM Power Workshop: https://www.ibm.com/training/course/QZC51G

In this post we'll share details on the course and describe the benefits of attending this class. This class is available in both classroom and instructor-led online (ILO) formats.

Clients are looking to streamline operations, redirect teams to higher-value tasks, and digitize manual processes while ensuring business continuity. IBM Power offers a suite of automation tools to help IT organizations meet these challenges effectively.

Ansible is one of the most popular tools for automating the management of infrastructure, such as servers. For Power administrators, the idea of using Ansible to automate the management of their Power systems is an attractive one, but often daunting to the uninitiated, but in reality, it is far from complicated. And given that IBM has embraced Ansible as its tool of choice for automating the management of its Power servers, if you are looking for a flexible, powerful tool to automate your Power administration tasks, Ansible is the way to go.

Starting your Power automation journey has never been easier with the Ansible on IBM Power workshop training.

Ansible on IBM Power Workshop:

Course Code: QZC51G

This new course has been purposely developed to help you learn how to efficiently manage an Ansible on IBM Power environment. During the class you’ll be introduced to the world of automation through hands-on curriculum developed by IBM experts and thought leaders. The material covers a deep-dive of Ansible on IBM Power, IBM PowerVC, IBM Power collections, automating deployment of modern web applications and more. You will work on our IBM Power servers located in Poughkeepsie, New York. Upon completion of this course, you will earn an IBM digital badge that recognizes your skills in this area.

Here are the objectives of this course:

· Summarize the key principles of DevOps in IT

· Recognize the requirements and procedure to setup Ansible on IBM Power

· Analyze the key components and their interactions within the Ansible architecture

· Automate server administration tasks with Ansible Playbooks

· Use IBM Power Collections on AIX, VIOS and HMC to automate routine tasks

· Recognize the various tasks which can be performed when Ansible is integrated with IBM PowerVC to manage AIX and Linux clients

· Develop Ansible playbooks that use infrastructure as code principles to orchestrate deployments in an IBM Power environment

Each day of class is divided into different lecture topics, followed by several hands-on labs, which allow you to implement what you’ve learnt in class. Here’s the agenda:

Day 1

Topics

· Unit 0: Course Administration and Introduction

· Unit 1: Introduction to DevOps

· Unit 2: Ansible Overview and Administration

· Unit 3: Ansible Configuration

Exercises:

· Exercise 1. Verification of Prerequisites

· Exercise 2. Ansible Setup and Configuration

· Exercise 3. IBM PowerVC Integration with Ansible

· Exercise 4. Ansible Roles

· Exercise 5. Ansible on IBM AIX

Day 2

Topics:

· Unit 4: IBM Power Collections

· Unit 5: Architecting Ansible Solutions

Exercises:

· Exercise 6. IBM Power AIX Collection

· Exercise 7. IBM Power VIOS Collection

· Exercise 8. IBM Power HMC Collection

· Exercise 9. IBM Power OpenStack Collection

· Exercise 10. Deploy Modern Web Applications on IBM Power from GitHub

· Exercise 11. Testing and Debugging Ansible Playbooks with Linting Tools

Students will take a deep-dive into the architecture and administration of Ansible, giving them the opportunity to grasp the benefits of Ansible by reviewing each of its major components in detail; by installing, tailoring and configuring an automation environment using Ansible in an IBM Power server environment (see figure 1).

Figure 1. QZC51G will help you understand the Ansible architecture and its benefits

From day one, you’ll explore the power of Ansible and its benefits for the Power platform. You will install and configure Ansible on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM AIX in a private cloud environment. You will be exposed to the Ansible on Power collections (available through Ansible Galaxy). IBM Power collections provide modules that can be used to manage IBM Power servers; collections are available for IBM AIX, VIOS, HMC, IBM i, and Linux on Power.

You can use these collections as part of an enterprise automation strategy. Want to automate the creation of a file system on AIX? Or perhaps you need to install an AIX interim fix on a group of AIX servers? In this class, students will learn how to write Ansible playbooks that achieve these and many other tasks.

Figure 2. Class exercise example. Running an Ansible automation playbook to install an AIX ifix.

You’ll also learn about deploying modern web applications on Power using Ansible.

This course is open to all interested learners, regardless of their experience. Typical students include customers, IBM technical personnel, Business Partner technical personnel, IT consultants and architects.

All of the content will be beneficial to both new and seasoned Power system administrators and users.

Conclusion:

The QZC51G courseware was written to serve as a practical guide for Power administrators looking to automate their environment. After attending this class students with be well prepared with all the information they need to begin their Ansible on Power journey.

IBM is invested in Ansible, and has teams dedicated to developing and updating various Ansible collections for IBM Power, which are freely available to everyone. The development teams are continuously working with clients to gather feedback on how they can improve their contributions to the Ansible on Power space. This is another compelling reason for Power administrators to embrace Ansible, knowing that IBM is along for the ride.

The IBM Power Technical Training team is continuously working hard to create new Power classes and training materials. So you can expect to see more updates from us in the future.

We hope to see you in class soon!