Advancement of technology has always led to easier lives for all its users. Ansible is one such booming technology, helping thousands of users to make their day-to-day work easier. But What exactly is Ansible? How does it work? And how it can be beneficial in your day-to-day work? Well, that’s the agenda of this blog, hope you’ll like it!
Ansible is a software tool that provides simple and powerful Automation for cross-platform computer support. It is mainly useful for IT professionals, enabling them to perform repetitive tasks like cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment and much more with ease. What makes Ansible better than its counterparts is that it is “Agentless” i.e. It does not require a daemon, or any other software installed on the end node, the only requirement is that python should be present, and the end nodes should be reachable via an SSH connection.
There are two important terminologies that we need to be aware of:
- Ansible Playbooks: While Ansible modules (written in python) are the muscle power behind Ansible, playbooks are required to invoke those modules. A playbook (YAML or JSON format) is nothing but the list of tasks that needs to be performed on the end node.
2. Inventory file: It contains the list of target nodes on which playbook needs to be run.
Controller node is the device on which Ansible is running and end nodes are the target nodes where the operations are performed. Ansible works by connecting to nodes via SSH and running the playbook on the target nodes. To run a playbook, all that’s required is, controller node can login into the end nodes. SSH keys are most used for this purpose, but other ways of authentication are also supported.
Ansible playbook and inventory file look something like this:
Here, nginx is being installed and run using Ansible. Inventory file containing two groups (webservers and dbservers), and various target nodes inside them.
This is how all these things come together:
Playbooks are executed on the controller node using the ansible-playbook command (ansible-playbook -i </path/to/inventory file> </path/to/playbook>), the controller node sends the required ansible modules to the target nodes. These modules are then executed on all the end nodes with the user attributes that are provided in the playbook.
Red Hat also provides a GUI Interface for Ansible technology called Ansible Automation Controller, available as a subscription purchase. It can also be used to perform tasks like reviewing logs and more.
Through a collection of modules, administrators can perform common AIX/VIOS tasks across multiple AIX or VIOS endpoints respectively without needing to log into individual machines directly. Ansible enables administrators to perform all these tasks without requiring them to have deep AIX or VIOS skills. These tasks can vary from Initial install of AIX to complex tasks like boot management, including inittab details.
We are currently offering AIX and VIOS collections in these categories:
1. Fix Management:
a. iFIX management.
b. Service Update Management Assistant (SUMA).
c. Fix Level Recommendation Tool (FLRT).
d. Generic Installation tools (geninstall).
e. Individual Installation and updates of software.
2. Filesystem Management:
a. Volume Group management.
b. Logical Volume management.
c. Backup for Volume Groups and Logical Volumes.
d. Filesystem Management.
e. Alternate rootvg disk management.
f. Backup of Volume.
3. Inventory:
a. Logical Volume Manager information.
b. Filesystem or updates information.
c. Logical Partition information.
d. Multipath I/O device information.
e. Filesystem Management.
f. Improvements in LPAR attribute, LLP, and fix information inventory collection.
4. Network Installation Manager:
a. NIM operations (server setup, install packages, update SP or TL, service boots).
b. NIM backups of LPAR and VIO Clients.
c. NIM for Fix Level Recommendation Tool (FLRT).
d. NIM for SUMA.
e. Automated AIX migration using NIM Alternate Disk Migration (NIMADM).
f. NIM resource manager.
5. VIOS Management via NIM:
a. Update a single or a pair VIOS servers.
b. Backup root volume group.
c. Create/Clean an alternate rootvg.
d. Check if a pair of VIOS can be updated.
e. Upgrade the VIOS software.
6. Miscellaneous:
a. Devices Management.
b. System Management (reboot, boot list, smtctl).
c. User Management.
d. Group Management.
e. Networking Management.
f. Automation of kernel tuning parameters.
g. Bosboot.
Apart from AIX and VIOS, these collections are also available for POWER platform:
1. IBM i
2. HMC
3. Oracle SI AIX
4. Oracle RAC AIX
5. POWER ODBA AIX
6. OpenStack
7. Linux on POWER
8. IBM cloud
Moreover, PowerHA and SAP Hana on POWER collection will also be available soon.
Making your day-to-day work easier!
AIX Collection:
Red Hat Automation Hub: https://console.redhat.com/ansible/automation-hub/repo/published/ibm/power_aix/
Ansible Galaxy: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ibm/power_aix
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/IBM/ansible-power-aix
VIOS Collection:
Red Hat Automation Hub: https://console.redhat.com/ansible/automation-hub/repo/published/ibm/power_vios/
Ansible Galaxy: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ibm/power_vios
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/IBM/ansible-power-vios
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#ansible-aix#ansible-power-vios#ansible