Exercise 1 - Exploring the lab environment

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Table of Contents

Objective

Explore and understand the lab environment.

These first few lab exercises will be exploring the command-line utilities of the Ansible Automation Platform. This includes

If you need more information on new Ansible Automation Platform components bookmark this landing page https://red.ht/AAP-20

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Diagram

Red Hat Ansible Automation

Guide

Step 1 - Connecting via VS Code

It is highly encouraged to use Visual Studio Code to complete the workshop exercises. Visual Studio Code provides:
  • A file browser
  • A text editor with syntax highlighting
  • A in-browser terminal
Direct SSH access is available as a backup, or if Visual Studio Code is not sufficient to the student. There is a short YouTube video provided if you need additional clarity: Ansible Workshops - Accessing your workbench environment.

Step 2 - Using the Terminal

Navigate to the network-workshop directory on the Ansible control node terminal.

[student@ansible-1 ~]$ cd ~/network-workshop/
[student@ansible-1 network-workshop]$ pwd
/home/student/network-workshop
[student@ansible-1 network-workshop]$

Step 3 - Examining Execution Environments

Run the ansible-navigator command with the images argument to look at execution environments configured on the control node:

$ ansible-navigator images

ansible-navigator images

Note

The output you see might differ from the above output

This command gives you information about all currently installed Execution Environments or EEs for short. Investigate an EE by pressing the corresponding number. For example pressing 0 with the above example will open the network-ee execution environment:

ee main menu

Selecting 2 for Ansible version and collections will show us all Ansible Collections installed on that particular EE, and the version of ansible-core:

ee info

Step 4 - Examining the ansible-navigator configuration

Either use Visual Studio Code to open or use the cat command to view the contents of the ansible-navigator.yml file. The file is located in the home directory:

$ cat ~/.ansible-navigator.yml
---
ansible-navigator:
  ansible:
    inventories:
    - /home/student/lab_inventory/hosts

  execution-environment:
    image: quay.io/acme_corp/network-ee:latest
    enabled: true
    container-engine: podman
    pull-policy: missing
    volume-mounts:
    - src: "/etc/ansible/"
      dest: "/etc/ansible/"

Note the following parameters within the ansible-navigator.yml file:

For a full listing of every configurable knob checkout the documentation

Step 5 - Examining inventory

The scope of a play within a playbook is limited to the groups of hosts declared within an Ansible inventory. Ansible supports multiple inventory types. An inventory could be a simple flat file with a collection of hosts defined within it or it could be a dynamic script (potentially querying a CMDB backend) that generates a list of devices to run the playbook against.

In this lab you will work with a file based inventory written in the ini format. Either use Visual Studio Code to open or use the cat command to view the contents of the ~/lab_inventory/hosts file.

$ cat ~/lab_inventory/hosts
[all:vars]
ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/aws-private.pem

[routers:children]
cisco
juniper
arista

[cisco]
rtr1 ansible_host=18.222.121.247 private_ip=172.16.129.86
[arista]
rtr2 ansible_host=18.188.194.126 private_ip=172.17.158.197
rtr4 ansible_host=18.221.5.35 private_ip=172.17.8.111
[juniper]
rtr3 ansible_host=3.14.132.20 private_ip=172.16.73.175

[cisco:vars]
ansible_user=ec2-user
ansible_network_os=ios
ansible_connection=network_cli

[juniper:vars]
ansible_user=ec2-user
ansible_network_os=junos
ansible_connection=netconf

[arista:vars]
ansible_user=ec2-user
ansible_network_os=eos
ansible_connection=network_cli
ansible_become=true
ansible_become_method=enable

[dc1]
rtr1
rtr3

[dc2]
rtr2
rtr4

[control]
ansible ansible_host=13.58.149.157 ansible_user=student private_ip=172.16.240.184

Step 6 - Understanding inventory

In the above output every [ ] defines a group. For example [dc1] is a group that contains the hosts rtr1 and rtr3. Groups can also be nested. The group [routers] is a parent group to the group [cisco]

Parent groups are declared using the children directive. Having nested groups allows the flexibility of assigining more specific values to variables.

We can associate variables to groups and hosts.

Note:

A group called all always exists and contains all groups and hosts defined within an inventory.

Host variables can be defined on the same line as the host themselves. For example for the host rtr1:

rtr1 ansible_host=18.222.121.247 private_ip=172.16.129.86

Group variables groups are declared using the vars directive. Having groups allows the flexibility of assigning common variables to multiple hosts. Multiple group variables can be defined under the [group_name:vars] section. For example look at the group cisco:

[cisco:vars]
ansible_user=ec2-user
ansible_network_os=ios
ansible_connection=network_cli

Step 7 - Using ansible-navigator to explore inventory

We can also use the ansible-navigator TUI to explore inventory.

Run the ansible-navigator inventory command to bring up inventory in the TUI:

ansible-navigator tui

Pressing 0 or 1 on your keyboard will open groups or hosts respectively.

ansible-navigator groups

Press the Esc key to go up a level, or you can zoom in to an individual host:

ansible-navigator host

Step 8 - Connecting to network devices

There are four routers, named rtr1, rtr2, rtr3 and rtr4. The network diagram is always available on the network automation workshop table of contents. The SSH configuration file (~/.ssh/config) is already setup on the control node. This means you can SSH to any router from the control node without a login:

For example to connect to rtr1 from the Ansible control node, type:

$ ssh rtr1

For example:

$ ssh rtr1
Warning: Permanently added 'rtr1,35.175.115.246' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.



rtr1#show ver
Cisco IOS XE Software, Version 16.09.02

Complete

You have completed lab exercise 1!

You now understand:


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