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9.0 - Appendix

02.1 - Setup Lab: Install VirtualBox

  • 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 virtualbox's site, 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

    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)]