Working with Ansible
Starting with this section, we'll use the Ansible CLI tools extensively to perform various configuration management tasks. To showcase our practical examples, we'll work with a custom lab environment, and we highly encourage you to reproduce it for a complete configuration management experience.
Here's the high-level outline of this section:
- Setting up the lab environment
- Configuring Ansible
- Using Ansible ad hoc commands
- Using Ansible playbooks
Let's start with an overview of the lab environment.
Setting up the lab environment
Our lab uses VMware Fusion as a desktop hypervisor for the virtual environment, but any other hypervisor will do. Chapter 1, Installing Linux, describes the process of creating Linux VMs with VMware Fusion and Oracle VM VirtualBox in detail. We deployed the following virtual machines to mimic a real-world configuration management infrastructure:
Neptune: The Ansible control node...
