Ansible is a tool used to automate Server provisioning and network provisioning. Ansible is completely free! You can dive deep into Ansible at their web site.
A great way to learn Ansible as a network automation tool is to use it in an emulated network environment. GNS3 fits that requirement perfectly. GNS3 is also completely free!
As many of you know, we have been users of GNS3 since forever, plus we were part of their crowd sourcing!
GNS3 has evolved tremendously in the past years. Using the versions after 2.x brings great functionality into GNS3 including Ansible. We strongly urge students to use GNS3 to learn Ansible. If you want to learn how to install and use GNS3, there is a separate reference here. Assuming you have version 2.x or later of GNS3 running, we will show how to accomplish this in a couple of simple videos below.
Even if you have never used GNS3, you can watch the videos below to get a clear understanding of how Ansible works!
Watch this video first to see exactly how to get Ansible with your GNS3 environment.
Install Ansible in GNS3 from Andrew Walding on Vimeo.
The next step is to configure IP addresses:
Here is the router configuration used:
enable configure terminal hostname R1 alias exec s show run alias exec c config terminal alias exec i show ip interface brief alias exec ipr show ip route ip tcp synwait 5 no service timestamps no service time debug line console 0 no login no exec-timeout logging synch privilege level 15 line aux 0 no login no exec-timeout logging synch privilege level 15 line vty 0 4 login local transport input all ip domain-name cellstream.com crypto key generate rsa 1024
interface f0/0 ip address 192.168.1.101 255.255.255.0 no shutdown username student pass csi123 username student priv 15 end write
Now let’s add some routers into the topology:
Now it is time to set up a simple Ansible environment. We will create a simple ansible.cfg file and a hosts file so ansible will be able to work with our routers:
It’s finally time to actually create an Ansible playbook and run it against our topology. You will find the playbook1.yml file available to download below the video.
Here is the playbook1.yml content:
---
- name: Install OSPF
hosts: [gns3routers]
gather_facts: false
connection: local
vars:
cli:
username: student
password: csi123
transport: cli
tasks:
- name: enable ospf
ios_config:
provider: "{{ cli }}"
authorize: yes
parents: router ospf 1
lines:
- network 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 area 0
register: print_output
- debug: var=print_output
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