Example usage of Ansible Network Module on Cisco IOS

Recently Peter Sprygada announced technology preview of the new Ansible Network Modules. Ansible 2.1 will bring support for basic tasks (_command, _config, _template) for various network equpiment, most notably Cisco IOS, IOS-XR, NX-OS and Juniper Junos platforms.

This repository contains working simple example that gathers show clock output from Cisco IOS switches. Following installation procedure was verified working on Mac OS X 10.11.3. Ansible playbook was executed on Cisco C2960X, IOS 15.2(2)E1 switches.

Install Ansible

Ensure you are using Ansible v2.1 or above:

ansible-playbook --version

If not install the latest version via your OS packager, for more information see http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_installation.html

Clone this repository to your working folder

Copy of all files in this repository will be downloaded to your mac/pc/whatever.

$ git clone git@github.com:brona/ansible-cisco-ios-example.git

[Optional] Edit your hosts file

If you will be using IP addresses directly in you inventory file or if you have properly working internal DNS you can skip this step.

$ sudo nano /etc/hosts

Example hosts file on Mac OS X:

127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost

10.0.0.1 switch1
10.0.0.2 switch2

Edit inventory

Add all network devices you want to gather time from to inventory file.

$ cd ansible-cisco-ios-example
$ nano inventory

Example inventory file:

# Example inventory file:
[ios_devices]
switch1
switch2

Run show_clock Playbook

$ ansible-playbook show_clock.yml
Username: ...
Password: ...
...

Playbook will prompt you for username and password that will be used to log in to inventory devices. Gathered output will be printed on screen.