Ansible Tower Upgrade – Quick Note on EC2 Sizing

by Matthew KimlerNo Comments
Last week I started on a personal project to get Ansible Tower upgraded in our lab. Our Tower deployment actually runs in AWS as an EC2 instance with some EBS backed storage. It's a simple and common setup for folks that are running Tower. There wasn't much excitement with this upgrade from 3.1 to 3.4 except for one minor hiccup. We typically run lean and mean in the lab, using only what we really need to use resource-wise. The AWS instance for Tower is a m3.medium which gives a single vCPU and 3.75 GB of RAM. Ansible Tower requires 2 GB RAM minimum but has a recommended size of 4 GB RAM. Thus, the m3.medium seems to the most ideal EC2 instance type of this type of testing workload. While the original 3.1 deployment had no issues with the m3.medium, the upgrade failed several times and quit reporting the following error: TASK [preflight : Preflight check - Fail if this machine lacks sufficient...
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Getting Started with NVIDIA Containers and DIGITS

by Matthew KimlerNo Comments
For the GTC 2019 conference, IAS wanted to put together something to demonstrate the value of NVIDIA's DGX platform for artificial intelligence and machine learning. I've never actually done anything like this before and so I welcomed the opportunity to get my hands on the DGX Station and learning how to unleash the power of Tesla V100 cards. I'm far from building SkyNet, but it only took a few days to get the hang of everything and get something rolling. To help others on this journey, I'm going to outline the process I used to get the DGX Station running a DIGITS docker container, download the MNIST data set, and do the basic test of DIGITS with some image classification. This is not the only way to accomplish this and this way might be a little "dirty", but it worked and the results were there. Thus, take this as a guide and move on from there. In our lab, everything is...
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Resetting Root for iDRAC inside a VRTX

by Matthew Kimler Comment Closed
It amazes me how confusing Dell's troubleshooting website is, or perhaps just how difficult it is to find useful information on it. All I wanted to do was reset the Root account on an iDRAC for a M520 blade within a VRTX. I was remote from the system and could access the Chassis Management Controller, but I must have fat fingered the password reset the last time I was in one of the blades. Well, there is a way to do this, but it was difficult to find the solution on Dell's site. Thus, once I figured it out, I figured I would note this down for others. Perhaps it will save someone else the headache of finding this info. For the record, these actions were taken on a VRTX running 3.2 of the CMC, so it might be different in newer or older versions. First, log into the CMC and go to Server Overview left menu option and then Setup...
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Ansible Tower Demo

by Matthew KimlerNo Comments
I mentioned in my recent NetApp Insight post that we created an Ansible Tower demo to show off at Insight this year. The Tower demo took the playbooks we created for Ansible Engine to spin up EC2 instances in AWS and clone a volume hosted on Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and with some slight tweaking, adjusted them to work in Ansible Tower as a Workflow. Like before, I wanted to record this demo so that others could see how the whole process worked. Because Tower is more a repo friendly solution for environments, we also created a GitHub repo for both the Ansible Engine playbooks and the Ansible Tower playbooks. They are slightly different, mostly because of how inventories are handled in Tower vs Engine. Additionally, there are some differences in how we handle variables and pass them from one playbook to another. I hope this demo is helpful for others to get going on their Ansible journey. If you want to check...
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NetApp Insight 2018 – IAS Update and Demos

by Matthew KimlerNo Comments
Hey everyone. I hope you're all doing well as always. NetApp Insight 2018 was last week and for the first time, I was able to attend. There was some concern that my wife might go into labor while I was gone, but the little one was nice enough to hang out through the conference. With that said, let's review some of the IAS stuff we did at Insight. IAS had a speaking session on Tuesday that had a solid turnout from attendees. The focus was on our updated Ansible demo that shows Ansible working its magic on EC2 instances and NetApp Cloud ONTAP. Shawn Hamby also did a great overview of Cloud Volume Service and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and the benefits of each. We also showed a little demo on Ansible Tower and how the entire set of playbooks we had already done in Ansible Engine could be combined into a single Tower Workflow. I think attendees were pleased that the session...
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Ansible Demo v2 – Scaling to AWS EC2 using Red Hat Ansible and Leveraging NetApp Cloud ONTAP

by Matthew KimlerNo Comments
Hey folks. I hope everyone is doing well. A real quick update on the Ansible Demo that we build several months ago for Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. The original demo was build mostly using the RAW module because at the time of the creation of the demo, NetApp had not yet published modules that would be relevant to the demo. However, that's all changed over the past few months and now NetApp has more Ansible modules than any other storage vendor. Hats off to David Blackburn and his team for working on it and keeping the updates rolling. With all of the changes, we decided to make a version two of the Ansible demo to showcase more NetApp modules than RAW commands. We still cannot completely move away from RAW commands as things, like collecting ONTAP version information and setting a Junction Path during a clone operation, are just not 100% available yet via a module. But at least we...
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NetApp Virtual Storage Console – Migrating to a New Server

by Matthew KimlerNo Comments
I ran into this with a customer this week and felt it was a good note to point out for those that are migrating customers or themselves to a new version of vCenter. In this particular case, the customer was upgrading from vCenter 5.1 to 6.5 through another 5.5 upgrade, and additionally was going to migrate from the Windows-based vCenter to the VCSA. Like many NetApp customers that have been using NetApp as their datastore storage platform, the customer had the Virtual Storage Console (VSC) plugin for vCenter setup and running many backup jobs. The VSC software is installed on a Windows server and typically, customers that were running vCenter on Windows also installed the VSC on the same Windows server. This is fine except when the upgrade path will take the customer from the Windows-based vCenter to the appliance, where the vCenter migration will shut down the existing vCenter to make use of the original IP address and FQDN. In...
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Red Hat Summit 2018 – Ansible Demo with NetApp Cloud Manager – Part Two – The Playbooks

by Matthew KimlerNo Comments
It was asked to have the playbooks shared with the community from the Ansible demo that was presented at the Red Hat Summit. Down below, I have each of the playbooks posted for anyone to take a look at and review. Please note that since this was my first time messing around with Ansible, there are most likely cleaner ways to do some of these activities, but these worked for our demo and should be a good starting point for others that want to try it out. Each playbook was broken into sections, but there's no reason that you could not put all of these into a single playbook. With that said, here you go! Playbook #1 - Basic Provisioning of EC2 instances in AWS. --- # Basic provisioning of EC2 instances. - name: Create AWS resources hosts: localhost connection: local gather_facts: False tasks: - name: Create an EC2 instance ec2: aws_access_key:...
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Red Hat Summit 2018 – Ansible Demo with NetApp Cloud Manager

by Matthew Kimler2 Comments
It's been a long time, so first apologies for being out of pocket for some time. It's been a very busy past few months with work and family. However, I'm back and I wanted to start off with a video demo that I created for the Red Hat 2018 Summit in San Francisco in May. At the conference, IAS decided to get a booth to meet with Red Hat customers and represent both Red Hat and NetApp. We decided that the best way to show off our experience with the two partners was to create a simple demonstration that might be of interest to attendees. Robert Nelson, another IAS engineer, and I put something together that we're both proud of. We chose to make a demo of how Ansible could be used to automate the deployment of Amazon EC2 instances, make some modifications, and then leverage a NetApp AWS instance to use our once on-premise data and use it on our...
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vRealize Business for Cloud – Lost EC2 Instances?

by Matthew KimlerNo Comments
This one is going to be short and sweet, at least it was to me. I upgraded my vRealize Automation environment in our IAS lab to version 7.3. I had a few hiccups because of an old IaaS node that had been replaced and never cleaned up (which you can read about in my other post this week), but other than it was pretty smooth. I also took the opportunity to upgrade the vRealize Business for Cloud to 7.3 to keep everything the same version, as a good engineer would. :) There were quite a few updates to vRB this time around, and those familiar with vRB will noticed the significant changes to the UI layout and reporting. A lot of the plumbing is similar when you start to drill down into things, but some new information is now available for customers. I'm not going to go through all of the new features in this post, but if you want to read...
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