What is Dell Technologies PowerStore – Part 16, Automation With Ansible

So far, we have covered the following aspects of Dell Technologies PowerStore:
High Level Overview,   Hardware,   AppsON,  vVols,  File Capabilities,  User Interface ,  Importing external storage, PowerStore local protection works , remote replication , VMware SRM integration , resource balancer , the integration with an upstream Kubernetes and / or RedHat OpenShift & The integration with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, CloudIQ & AppSync

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy – and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

On this page, we’ll give you a really quick overview so you can see things in context. For more detail, hop over to docs.ansible.com.

EFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE

Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs, called “Ansible modules” to them. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default), and removes them when finished.

Your library of modules can reside on any machine, and there are no servers, daemons, or databases required. Typically you’ll work with your favorite terminal program, a text editor, and probably a version control system to keep track of changes to your content.

SSH KEYS ARE YOUR FRIENDS

Passwords are supported, but SSH keys with ssh-agent are one of the best ways to use Ansible. Though if you want to use Kerberos, that’s good too. Lots of options! Root logins are not required, you can login as any user, and then su or sudo to any user.

Ansible’s “authorized_key” module is a great way to use ansible to control what machines can access what hosts. Other options, like kerberos or identity management systems, can also be used.

ssh-agent bash


ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
			

MANAGE YOUR INVENTORY IN SIMPLE TEXT FILES

By default, Ansible represents what machines it manages using a very simple INI file that puts all of your managed machines in groups of your own choosing.

To add new machines, there is no additional SSL signing server involved, so there’s never any hassle deciding why a particular machine didn’t get linked up due to obscure NTP or DNS issues.

If there’s another source of truth in your infrastructure, Ansible can also plugin to that, such as drawing inventory, group, and variable information from sources like EC2, Rackspace, OpenStack, and more.

Here’s what a plain text inventory file looks like:

[webservers]


www1.example.com


www2.example.com


[dbservers]


db0.example.com


db1.example.com
			

Once inventory hosts are listed, variables can be assigned to them in simple text files (in a subdirectory called ‘group_vars/’ or ‘host_vars/’) or directly in the inventory file.

Or, as already mentioned, use a dynamic inventory to pull your inventory from data sources like EC2, Rackspace, or OpenStack.

THE BASICS: USING ANSIBLE FOR AD HOC PARALLEL TASK EXECUTION

Once you have an instance available, you can talk to it right away, without any additional setup:

ansible all -m ping 


ansible foo.example.com -m yum -a "name=httpd state=installed"


ansible foo.example.com -a "/usr/sbin/reboot"
			

Note that we have access to state-based resource modules as well as running raw commands. These modules are extremely easy to write and Ansible ships with a fleet of them so most of your work is already done.

Ansible contains a giant toolbox of built-in modules, well over 750 of them

Ansible Modules for Dell EMC PowerStore 1.0

• Accelerates provisioning operations through powerful Ansible platform.
• Modules: Host module, Snapshot Rules module, Volume Group module, Host Group module, Volume module, Gather Facts module, Protection Policy module

Below, You can see a demo how it all works, with Dell EMC PoweStore

• Visit the  Dell EMC Ansible GitHub page for Ansible Modules download and documentation.