Ansible Test Lab

This lab can be used to experiment around with the power of Ansible. Vagrant is used to setup the following set of VMs for the lab environment:

Node	Are
ansible-master	ubuntu/xenial64
ubuntu-node1	ubuntu/xenial64
ubuntu-node2	ubuntu/xenial64
ubuntu-node3	ubuntu/xenial64
centos-node1	centos/7
centos-node2	centos/7
centos-node3	centos/7
debian-node1	debian/jessie64
debian-node2	debian/jessie64
debian-node3	debian/jessie64

Lab Setup

Setup Vagrant

On a Ubuntu based machine the following commands can be used to install the latest version of Vagrant

wget -c https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/2.0.3/vagrant_2.0.3_x86_64.deb
sudo dpkg -i vagrant_2.0.3_x86_64.deb`

After successful installation also add the vagrant-hosts plugin which will be used to register all Vagrant machines in hosts file.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-hosts

Start the Lab environment

In the folder with the Vagrant file the following command will setup all the VMs. This may take a while.

vagrant up

Now one can ssh into the ansible-master VM.

vagrant ssh ansible-master

Last step before playing around is installing latest Ansible version.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ansible sshpass

Verify setup

While still logged into ansible-master perform the following commands to ensure the setup is running.

cd /opt/ansible
ansible -i production all -m ping -k

The command will ask for the ssh password which is vagrant. After entering this Ansible will perform an Ansible-ping with all nodes.

Lab Experiments

Following some simple experiments to try out and investigate in order to get started.

Experiment 1: Distribute SSH Keys

In this experiment we want to add an SSH key to the authorized_keys of each server. Let us first generate some ssh keys.

ssh-keygen
ansible-playbook -i production distribute-ssh-key.yml -k

After this step you should be able to perform your Ansible commands without providing an SSH command.

ansible -i production all -m ping

Interesting to see as well that Ansible modules behave idempotent. Performing the same step again should have no effect.

ansible-playbook -i production distribute-ssh-key.yml

Experiment 2: Install open-vm-tools

ansible-playbook -i production install-vmware-tools.yml

Experiment 3: Facts gathering

To see what facts are available for a certain host use the following command:

ansible -i production -m setup ubuntu-node1

To collect certain facts for all hosts use the following

ansible -i production -a 'filter=ansible_memtotal_mb' -m setup all
ansible -i production -a 'filter=ansible_kernel' -m setup all