A Simple Guide to Setup Ansible Tower in GCP VM

Overview

A more enterprise-level version of Ansible is Ansible Tower. It is a web-based management tool with an intuitive user interface that gives you a dashboard with all the host state summaries. It permits speedy deployments while keeping and maintaining all configurations.

The tower logs every job manages inventories graphically and syncs them with a wide range of cloud providers. It also enables us to share SSH passwords without disclosing them.

Prerequisites to Install Ansible Tower

Installing the Ansible Tower requires the following prerequisites, for example:

• Supported Operating Systems
  * RedHat Enterprise Linux 8
  * Centos Linux 8 (Soon this will deprecate)
• Install stable release of Ansible (ansible 2.9)
• Minimum 4 GB free RAM required

Challenges in Ansible

• SPOF (Single point of failure), as an ansible controller installed in one of the systems.
• Inventory format is text, it contains a lot of information like hostname, username, password|key|token. Keeping the password in a readable format is a big security challenge.

Why Ansible Tower?

Ansible tower is a platform that does a lot of management for us. Ex. Managing the inventory file. To store passwords, keys, and tokens provide separate credentials options where data remain in an encrypted format.

It also provides RBAC (role-based access control). It can also integrate with APM tools like AppDynamics, and Dynatrace (Red hat partner) to solve problems automatically. Remediation.

Steps to Deploy Ansible Tower on Centos 8

Step 1 – Launching Centos 8 VM on GCP.

Step 2 – The instance is launched and now we connect with the terminal.

Step 3 – Download the Ansible Tower tar file & untar the file

Index of /ansible-tower/setup  – here, all the versions of ansible tower are available. I’ll be using the latest version.

Step 4 – Install Ansible into the system

sudo yum install ansible

Check the ansible version: ansible –version

Step 5 – Configure the inventory file

vim inventory

Step 6 – Run the setup to configure ansible-tower

sudo ./setup.sh

Step 7 – Copy the public IP and paste it into the browser

< This has been configured in the inventory file in step no.5 >

Username: admin

Password: yourpassword

Step 8 – Request a Subscription. Ansible-tower is not a free product hence we required a subscription.

Select ‘I agree’ and then continue.

Step 9 – Welcome to Ansible Tower Dashboard

Steps to Deploy Suse-Rancher Using Ansible Tower

Step 1: Create Project for managing the playbook.

Step 2: Create Inventory to manage everything related to inventory

Step 3: Create Source that is part of the inventory. This helps us to manage the host’s file.

Step 4: Create Template that helps us to integrate all the above steps.

Using GitHub for playbook code and inventory management

This code helps you to launch the rancher on the target node as the rancher required Kubernetes (K3s distribution) and Kubernetes requires a container engine. Hence first we install docker and then suse rancher.

For more information follow the documentation of the official website – Getting Started with Kubernetes | Rancher Quick Start

Url:- https://github.com/GitNegi/Ansibe_SuseRancher.git

Hosts

The host file contains information related to the target system like IP address, ansible_user, etc. Password, key, or token we can store on the credentials in ansible tower.

[suse_rancher]

Playbook Execution Screenshot

Let’s check rancher – open the browser copy paste the public IP

The target system OS is openSUSE

Successfully deployed suse rancher using ansible tower

Conclusion

Ansible tower is a web UI based configuration tool. Provides all the facilities the same as ansible but in UI based on some extra features like Create Organization, Project, etc. This helps us to customize or manage the project easily. Features like a trigger and the pipeline are also included in Ansible Tower.

Ansible tower is helping us to do a lot of management related to the projects. As well as overcomes the challenges we normally face in an ansible controller or engine like SPOF.

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Drop a query if you have any questions regarding Ansible Tower and I will get back to you quickly.

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