Ansible Tower

The SovLabs Ansible Tower module enables advanced provisioning capabilities from vRA while providing the ability to manage dynamic inventories and grouping for ongoing Ansible Tower Day 2 management


Compatibility

Ansible Tower 3.0.x, 3.1.x, 3.2.x
VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) 7.2+
VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) 7.2+
EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) 4.x

Highlights

General

  • Support for multiple Tower endpoints, inventories and profiles
  • Support for vRA Auto Scale feature
  • SovLabs Template Engine allows for static text in combination with dynamic content such as vRA custom properties and/or custom logic

Ansible Tower Dynamic Inventory Support

  • Ability to define and filter inventories and groups based on vRA constructs (e.g. tenant, business group, network, deployment name, component name, or any VM property)
  • Ability to include meta data (vRA properties, deployment and request data, vRA constructs, etc.) for each host
  • Ability to include existing/previously deployed vRA inventory into Ansible Tower to enable management of vRA deployed inventory via Tower Configurable caching for dynamic inventory (additive caching, cache expiration, page size, etc.)
  • Multiple vRA/vRO instances and multi-tenant support
  • Ability to specify individual hosts (–hostname parameter)
  • Inventoried VMs have a complete list of vRA properties, deployment and request data, vRA constructs, etc., which can be used to dynamically determine which playbooks to run, values to be written into files, etc.

vRA Provisioning Capabilities

  • Ability to create a Tower profile, encompassing the following capabilities:
    • Can be attached globally to a vRA (composite) blueprint or to an individual VM component, with a 1:1 ratio of profile to VM
    • Executed for VMs being provisioned by vRA in context of blueprint/deployment
    • User selectable or Administrator pinnable job Template per Blueprint via the SovLabs Template Engine
    • Ability to filter on team and project
    • Ability to pick one or more job templates from Tower inventory
    • Ability to specify one or more job templates via SovLabs templated definition utilizes template engine to dynamically render based on runtime VM properties
    • Ability to override credential selection using credentials defined in Tower
    • Ability to override inventory, default based on job template
    • Ability to configure machines to limit job template execution to (default limits to machines in a given vRA deployment of a composite blueprint)
    • Ability to supply extra vars, as a JSON or YAML formatted string which can include variables given by the user, including answers to survey questions. Extra vars can be templated via SovLabs Template Engine.
  • Supports vSphere and AWS machine types with future support for Azure
  • Supports single or multi-machine, including nested blueprints
  • Supports Tower’s ability to execute on multiple VM components at once by injecting and filtering dynamic inventories/groupings for VMs within respective deployment/blueprint during provisioning

Quick Start Process

  1. Define Ansible Tower Endpoint
  2. Define Ansible Tower Profile
  3. Define Ansible Tower Inventory Profile
  4. Apply Ansible Tower vRA Property Group to existing blueprint
  5. Provision!