1s & 0s-Current Trends in DC Networking - Ansible

[that1guy15]

Current Trends in DC Networking - Ansible

Moving along in the series, I guess its time to start automating something, right? Yes lets automate!



Ansible has been around for a while and is popular among server and network engineers. As the product matures the community backing and support keeps growing and getting stronger.

On the server side of the house, Ansible is great at automating the build and deployment of service stacks on
Source: Current Trends in DC Networking - Ansible

From http://blog.movingonesandzeros.net/

[deanwebb]

Good stuff, looking forward to more.

Question: does Ansible require any python pre-installed or anything like that? I've had a pain of a time trying to get python on my Windows box at work, which is one more thing that gets me closer to going with a full Linux box one day...

[Otanx]

I don't know if Ansible itself does, but most of the plug-ins like ntc-ansible do. A linux VM running in VMWare player is usually enough to play with. I also found out last weekend is the new version of VMWare player will auto-detect the Ubuntu install media, and do an automated installation. Then you can login, and just get to work. Saved me a bunch of time this weekend when I had to spin up 3 linux boxes for some testing.

-Otanx

[that1guy15]

Yes it does require python. More specifically 2.6 or 2.7 but 3.x support is coming. Which I wonder how newer OSs with 3 only handle this.

http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_installation.html#control-machine-requirements


Ansible does not support windows. I have not heard of a roadmap either. Just get yo self a RHEL or Ubuntu VM. Or spin up a Vagrant lab.

[deanwebb]

Yep, Linux it is for stuff like that... Python on Windows is too much pain, bro...

[wintermute000]

With win10 not really

[Dieselboy]

I started to install the /bash/ shell on my windows 10 laptop but it said it needed a reboot so I moved on to something else. I may have rebooted since then so I'll check it out monday. Apparently it uses ubuntu or something?

I've seen an automation thread floating about here, I will definitely be checking it out. Automation is the holy grail of my life. I'd prefer to automate or at least let customers manage their own stuff as much as possible. I'm still deploying OpenStack. That uses ansible and puppet and the end result is customers can spin up and spin down their own VMs from a web portal.

[burnyd]

windows 

[wintermute000]

Pycharm + remote interpreter + vmware workstation + unetlab loaded up with everything python/ansible related = my usual all-in-one. Code and test on the same VM straight to nested VMs. Deploy pre-set unetlab scenarios, stage with ZTP / ansible, start throwing API calls at them.

With Pycharm remote interpreter its pretty much transparent (the fact that your code is actually on a VM), pretty much syncs anything you type almost instantaneously.

the only issue with win10 'ubuntu' I've found so far is
- pycharm can't hook into it, feature request - there are workarounds that involve ssh-ing into a loopback, ugh
- SSH port forwarding is borked, but this is already fixed in an insider release
But even if it was working perfectly, I'd still need a unetlab or whatever test environment so might as well code directly to that.


I also do futz around with Vmware/NSX so I do need powershell/powerCLI. Fat client not so much now that the HTML5 host client is workable.

burnyd/aspiring, whats your take if I have a customer who is basically saying that they're wedded to chef? Hows the state of Arista support with chef? I know its compatible but whats it really like?
would be so much easier if ansible... don't wanna learn ruby LOL

If I could get 100% hardware support and comparable battery life (all the ACPI nitty gritty etc), Office 2013 and all my corporate crap working on Linux I would have no hesitation running linux natively. As it stands Win10 works for me because I am religiously anti-Apple (I despise them ever since those 'trendy' ipod commercials, don't give a crap whether they're actually technically good or not, its basically a religious hatred LOL).

[deanwebb]

Although, it is quite trendy now for all the sales guys to use Apple laptops... and then fumble around trying to get the right dongle to hook into the video projector feed...

But back to the main topic: I have a question. We're talking about ansible and chef and then it takes a turn into whether one is python or ruby... so does one automation suite go with a language? Or can they be made to do different languages?

[icecream-guy]

Although, it is quite trendy now for all the sales guys to use Apple laptops... and then fumble around trying to get the right dongle to hook into the video projector feed...

But back to the main topic: I have a question. We're talking about ansible and chef and then it takes a turn into whether one is python or ruby... so does one automation suite go with a language? Or can they be made to do different languages?

ruby
python
ansible
puppet
& chef are all programming languages

I believe chef was written in ruby, much as more conventional (old school) languages my have been written in assembler.

[that1guy15]

This is where I start to get overwhelmed.

Ansible is built with python and uses it alot. But most of the playbooks and stuff are built using YAML. But other areas such as templates use Jinja2. Yeah...

Not a clue about Chef. Know about it but never touched it.