About 8 months ago I began to develop an instructor led Ansible Workshop that could be led from my place of work. We have a mini-datacenter lab and I found it nice to get some customers in the office and go over some Ansible playbooks. I also really enjoy sharing some of the knowledge I […]
Tag: Ansible
VMware Webinar Series
As I begin to wind down the VMware webinar series, I wanted to bring all the content I have been working on for this series into a single blog write-up. Enabling Self-Service VMs and Containers for Users This series began with the automation of virtual infrastructure components including Virtual Machines and Kubernetes clusters. This solution included vRealize […]
VM Template Updater with Ansible
I was working on a process for keeping Windows VM templates up to date in vSphere. I have seen this done before either by hand, which seems to never meet cadence expectations, and automated fashions with scripts. I have recently been exploring Ansible modules for Windows and decided to give this one a shot using […]
General Automation Thoughts and a Video
Humor me for a moment here… I have been reading a lot of books on k8s and I realized that you could probably categorize automation into three categories. Very similar to the Kubernetes object types used inside K8s clusters to support applications. We will forego the "Set" lingo and just use the main terms. Daemon […]
ServiceNow MID Server Install with Ansible
Summary: This article demonstrates a way to auto download and install the MID server files from ServiceNow using Ansible on the localhost. This allows you to leverage Ansible easily by passing ServiceNow workflows to Ansible which is already installed on the MID server. Although this solution installs the MID server local, the role from ServiceNow […]
Ansible Variables, Prompts and T-Shirt Size VMs
This post describes a technique for using Ansible variables to create a menu driven request for vSphere VMs and allowing for "t-shirt sizes" to govern CPU and memory. This technique could be used to size system disks as well as other enhanced request offerings for menu driven requests. This post also shows examples of vars_prompt, […]
Ansible – Manage Active Directory Group Membership
Goal: Have Ansible manage the department based groups in an organization. The goal is to use the user department attribute in AD to maintain department based group membership for the organization. Requirements: Ansible – I am using 2.8.5 An AD account that can and create update AD groups Pywinrm installed on the Ansible control node […]
Ansible Playbook Basics
Basic on Playbooks – Plays are a collection of key value pairs. Keys in the same pair should share the same indentation. Playbooks are YAML files with the .yml file extension. Indentation is super important and the indention should be configured in vim. The indentation is based on two spaces. – For better vim editing […]
Running Ad-hoc Commands in Ansible Tower
This should be short but I have trouble finding this every time I look for it. So I am writing about it here because it took me forever to find it in the first place. From Dashboard go to Inventories – Or just go to Inventories Click on the Inventory to target for host list […]
Ansible Tower with Active Directory Integration
We want to have a new org implemented in Tower tied to AD groups and Teams built to assign permissions to Job Templates, also using AD Groups.
Vagrant Ansible Sandbox with VirtualBox
Not too long ago I built a little Vagrant sandbox for VirtualBox with Ansible so that I could develop and test playbooks while offline from the lab and on my laptop. Here is a link to the github repo. https://github.com/mccbryan3/vagrant-ansible-sandbox Vagrant repo stuff changes so please check the Vagrantfile for image availabliltiy. vagrant destroy -f […]