The new ibm.csm v1.0.0 Ansible Collection
Red Hat Ansible is an Automation platform that helps provide customers a way to automate the management of their entire enterprise environment. From servers to storage, customers can create custom playbooks that help lower management costs, as well as prevent user errors that can occur when having to manually make changes across a large environment. Based on an open source framework, a growing number of customers are now adopting Ansible to help automate their workload while simultaneously being able to take advantage of contributions by other companies attempting to perform the same actions.
IBM has now officially released an Ansible Collection for IBM Copy Services Manager (CSM). CSM provides replication monitoring and management capabilities for IBM Flashsystem and IBM DS8000 storage systems.
By creating an Ansible Collection for IBM CSM, customers can now build on the already advanced replication management and automation provide by CSM to create end to end solutions across their host systems and storage systems.
By combining the ibm.csm v1.0.0 collection with the Spectrum Virtualize collection you can not only configure the FlashSystem volumes needed in your environment, but automate the configuration of the disaster recovery solution as well!! Wrap that with the extensive set of collections available on Ansible Galaxy for your host systems, and you can create true END to END solutions!!!
What automation is possible with the ibm.csm v1.0.0 collection?
What does v1.0.0 support? Here are a few things that the collection supports:
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- Create and delete CSM sessions
- Add and remove copy sets in CSM sessions
- Run commands against CSM sessions (ex. Start, Suspend, Recover, Backup, etc)
- Enable, disable or Run Scheduled tasks
- Query all aspects of the CSM server (ex. sessions, copy sets, states, consistency, etc)
- Manage the active/standby server configuration for CSM
- Run any REST call available on the CSM server even if the collection does not support it in an official module yet
Here is a list of the Modules in this release:
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| ibm_csm_active_standby_action |
Manage the active / standby server connection for a CSM server |
| ibm_csm_copyset_manage |
Add or remove copy sets for a CSM session |
| ibm_csm_info |
Query all aspects of sessions and the server |
| ibm_csm_run_any_rest_call |
Use this module to call anything supported in REST but not yet in the collection |
| ibm_csm_scheduled_task_action |
Run, enable or disable scheduled tasks |
| ibm_session_action |
Issue commands against a CSM session |
| ibm_csm_session_manage |
Create or delete CSM sessions |
Installing and using ibm.csm v1.0.0
The ibm.csm v1.0.0 update does have uses the pyCSM python library in order to make REST calls on the CSM server.
NOTE: While this solution was tested primarily on a CSM 6.3.4 level of code, the majority of the CSM REST API was already developed and thus the solution should be compatible with all CSM 6.3.x levels of code.
pyCSM v1.0.1 library - The latest version of pyCSM, v1.0.1, supports the ibm.csm v1.0.0 collection. Click the link to view the library or install/upgrade pyCSM into your python environment using pypi
pip install pyCSM.
ibm.csm Ansible collection - Click the link to view the details on the v1.0.0 version of the ibm.csm ansible library. Or install the latest using the command:
ansible-galaxy collection install ibm.csm
Automate Application Consistent Safeguarded Copy backups/snapshots and more!!!!
Download the ibm.csm Ansible collection and create automation solutions for you're environment. This includes solutions that can help manage your Cyber Resiliency solutions!!!
Check out the following blog to learn more about how CSM's Scheduled tasks can now be setup to call external scripts allowing customers to take application consistent backups, snapshots and more!
https://community.ibm.com/community/user/storage/blogs/randy-blea1/2022/03/04/create-application-consistent-safeguarded-copy-bac
Or reach out to IBM lab services to explore further ways to use IBM Ansible collections in your environment.
Shout Outs
Just want to take a moment to thank a few people/groups for help in reaching this milestone and setting us up for future enhancements.
And I want to make another shout out to both Dominic Blea and Tom Zito, both of whom dedicated time out of their schedules to work on the ibm.csm Ansible solution.
#IBMDS8000#ansible #Automation #flashsystems