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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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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