Ansible Networking Demos

This is a set of playbooks for demonstrating the capabilities of Ansible to automate networks

Inventory

In cloud environments, it is best to pull inventory dynamically. For the purposes of this, however, we create a static inventory on the control node as follows:

[all]
rtr1 ansible_host=107.23.75.127 ansible_network_os=ios ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user
rtr2 ansible_host=34.193.22.128 ansible_network_os=ios ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user
control ansible_host=34.193.197.125 ansible_network_os=none ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user
host1 ansible_host=172.18.2.38 ansible_network_os=none ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user
[network]
rtr1 ansible_host=107.23.75.127 ansible_network_os=ios ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user
rtr2 ansible_host=34.193.22.128 ansible_network_os=ios ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user
[routers]
rtr1 ansible_host=107.23.75.127 ansible_network_os=ios ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user
rtr2 ansible_host=34.193.22.128 ansible_network_os=ios ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user
[ungrouped]
[hosts]
control ansible_host=34.193.197.125 ansible_network_os=none ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user
host1 ansible_host=172.18.2.38 ansible_network_os=none ansible_ssh_user=ec2-user

The inventory items are grouped function and are stored in the hosts file in the inventory directory:

.
├── inventory/                  # Inventory directory
│   │
│   ├── host_vars/              # device specific vars files
│   │   ├── rtr1
│   │   │   ├── interfaces.yml  # Device specific interface config
│   │   │   └── ospf.yml        # Device specific OSPF config
│   │   └── switch1
│   │       ├── interfaces.yml  # Device specific interface config
│   │       └── vlans.yml       # Device specific vlan config
│   │
│   ├── group_vars/             # group specific vars files
│   │   ├── all.yml             # Global config   
│   │   ├── network.yml         # Network specific
│   │   └── firewall.yml        # Function specific
│   │   
│   └── hosts         # Contains only the hosts in the dev environment
└── . . .

Playbook Variables

Certain vars files are also created and pre-populated with key/value pairs that represent the Source of Truth for the network. For example, an interfaces.yml file is create in inventory\host_vars\{{ invetnory_hostname }} with the interface information for that host:

interfaces:
  - name: GigabitEthernet1
    ip: 172.17.0.254/24
    public_ip_address: 107.23.75.127
    public_dns_name: ec2-107-23-75-127.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  - name: GigabitEthernet2
    ip: 172.17.1.254/24
    public_ip_address: 34.192.63.70
    public_dns_name: ec2-34-192-63-70.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  - name: GigabitEthernet3
    ip: 172.17.2.254/24
    public_ip_address:
    public_dns_name:

License

GPL-3

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In addition to open source Ansible, there is Red Hat® Ansible® Engine which includes support and an SLA for the nxos_facts module shown above.

Red Hat® Ansible® Engine is a fully supported product built on the simple, powerful and agentless foundation capabilities derived from the Ansible project. Please visit ansible.com for more information.