Create an Ansible configuration management provider and run Discovery

Create an Ansible configuration management provider, and then run Discovery on the provider to find its resources.

Before you begin

• Ensure to have an Ansible server and Ansible credentials.
• If you want to use Ansible Tower version 3.6.x or higher, ensure to set the mid.cmp.ansible.api_version property to V2. You can access this property under the Properties section of the Mid Server module.
• Role required: cloud_admin

About this task

Important:

Starting with the Orlando release, the cloud provisioning blueprints are available on instances upgraded from a previous release, but you cannot create a blueprint. Existing blueprints and catalog items created from those blueprints remain unaffected and continue to work.

Procedure

1. In the Cloud Admin Portal, navigate to Manage > Config Management.
2. Select New.
3. On the form fill in the fields.
   Note:

   Most information required to create an Ansible configuration management provider comes from the Ansible Tower server settings.

   Field	Description
   Name	Descriptive name for the configuration provider.
   Organization	Ansible Tower organization for access control You can obtain this information from the configuration management provider console.
   URL	URL of the Ansible Tower. Enter the full URL of the Ansible Tower including the https://<IP> protocol.
   Provider	Configuration provider type. Select Ansible Tower from the drop-down list.
   Server Type	Ansible Tower server type.
   Credential	Credentials to access the Ansible server. For more information on creating credential for Ansible server, see Ansible credentials.
   Version	Version of the configuration provider you are creating. Note: For Ansible Tower versions higher than 3.1.2, select 3.4.0 from the list.

4. Select Submit.
5. Select the Ansible Tower configuration provider card.

   

6. Select Discover Now to find the resources in the Ansible configuration management provider.
   Note:

   If you provision or otherwise change resources through the configuration management provider interface, you must manually run discovery again through the Config Providers page. You cannot create a scheduled discovery for configuration management providers.
   The discovered resources appear under Entities.

   The following Ansible Tower resources are discovered:

   • Ansible Inventory: Displays the discovered applications and virtual resources.
   • Cfg Installable: Displays theactual components that run when the applications install. For Ansible, the items in this list are job templates, which are also referred to as runlists in this form.

   Figure 1. Example Ansible Inventory

   

   Figure 2. Ansible config installables (job templates)

   

7. Select Ansible Inventory to explore the contents.
   Note:

   Communicate the supported applications to users so they can select the correct application from the Hostgroup field in the Cloud User Portal. The Hostgroup field shows all possible applications (called Groups in Ansible), not just the ones that the configuration management provider supports. Therefore, the provisioning fails when the user selects an unsupported application.

   Figure 3. Ansible Tower groups within an inventory

   

What to do next

After a user provisions a resource, the Stack Status indicates how the system runs through the Create node, Bootstrap, and ExecuteConfigPackage steps. You can obtain the IP address of a virtual machine in the User Portal by navigating to Stacks > {category} and selecting the new virtual machine. Open the configuration management provider server to see the newly provisioned resource on the node that the user specified.