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9.0 - Appendix

02.1 - Setup Lab: Install VirtualBox

Notes

  • The labs for this course and project are advised to be done on Virtualbox, the free Virtualisation tool.
  • Whilst this program is free and can be downloaded from here, its UI, functionality, and performance pales in comparison to the likes of VMWare, which I'll be using for this.
  • In reality, as long as you can run VMs on the tool and can make linked clones, you're good to go.
  • Steps:
  • Create a template VM from a CentOS base machine
  • Create an Ansible Control Machine and two Target Machines for the Control Machine to apply configurations
  • Once the template VM is setup, make sure that the network connection is set to bridged (VMNet0) and verify this appropriately.

02.2 - Setup Lab: Clone VMs and Install Ansible

Notes

  • Now that a base template VM has been created, we can create clone VMs from this for the purposes of the practice labs.
  • Linked clones are generally preferred as the only additional storage required for them is any changes made to them outside of the base VM e.g. installed packages.
  • To create a linked clone, select "manage" from the VM library pane for the template VM, then follow the wizard to create a clone from the current state of the VM and make it a "linked" clone.
  • Just creating "ansible-target" and "ansible-controller" for now, will add one more ansible target later.
  • Verify that the IP addresses of the two machines are different via any of the following ifconfig, hostname -i, etc, and ssh into them from Powershell
  • For ease of use, it's better to create a dedicated ssh session to these vms via a tool such as MobaXterm
  • To change the hostname of the system (to make it reflect ansible-controller and ansible-target), edit /etc/hostname, and /etc/hosts as appropriate.
  • for the latter, after the first "localhost" on each line, delete and replace with "ansible-controller" or ansible-target1" as appropriate
  • Create another linked clone and name it target2, repeating the process for target1.
  • Can now install ansible on the ansible-controller VM, instructions can be found via the Ansible documentation.

  • For our CentOS VMs run

    bash sudo yum install epel-release sudo yum install ansible

  • Verify that ansible is installed via:

ansible --version

The output should be similar to:

ansible 2.9.27
config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
configured module search path = [u'/home/nstephenson/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
ansible python module location = /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible
executable location = /usr/bin/ansible
python version = 2.7.5 (default, Oct 14 2020, 14:45:30) [GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-44)]