DellEMC OpenManage Ansible Demo

Getting Started

1. Setup Python Virtual Environment (optional but recommended)

pip install virtualenv
mkdir ~/venv
python -m virtualenv ~/venv/ansible-dell
source ~/venv/ansible-dell/bin/activate

2. Install Dependencies

pip install omsdk pyvmomi paramiko ansible
ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

3. Save the passphrase in a file called .vault_password. This file is referenced in the ansible.cfg config file vault_password_file setting.

echo "abc123" > .vault_password

4. Create an encrypted vault file (vault.yml) to store passwords. This will use the passphrase from the .vault_password file.

ansible-vault create vault.yml

These variables will be used in the examples and should be filled in.

# iDRAC Credentials
vault_oob_username: ""
vault_oob_password: ""
# OME Credentials
vault_ome_username: ""
vault_ome_password: ""

# Optional
vault_share_host: ""
vault_vcenter_host: ""
vault_vcenter_username: ""
vault_vcenter_password: ""
vault_esxi_username: ""
vault_esxi_password: ""
vault_network_username: ""
vault_network_password: ""

5. Update the inventory inventory/us-west/hosts with your hosts. Two host variables are used: oob_host to identify the out-of-band (iDRAC) IP or hostname and service_tag which is used in the ome_* modules.

[group-name]
hostname oob_host=<iDRAC IP or Hostname> service_tag=<Service Tag>

6. Update global variables. Edit the inventory/us-west/all/00_all.yml file and update the vault_ome_host variable. This can be the OpenManage Enterprise server or MX7000 Chassis for OpenManage Modular.

vault_ome_host: "mx7000-chassis.example.com"

7. Execute a playbook

ansible-playbook -i inventory/us-west ome-device-info.yml

Custom Modules

The library folder contains modules developed by myself which have not been officially released yet. These are to be used at you own risk.

Network Modules

Credentials to login to network switches are stored in the following vault variables vault_network_username and vault_network_password. These variables are referenced in the group_vars file switches-os10.yml which sets the necessary parameters to use the network_cli connection. This requires the paramiko Python library to be installed.

Inventory

Instead of maintaining all of your hosts within a single inventory file, an inventory can be maintained for each of your individual environments. Separate group_vars directories are also maintained. Symlinks can be used to share group variable files between environments. This can be used to separate environments (dev, test, prod) or physical locations (us-west, us-east).

Target multiple inventories by specifing the -i parameter again. Ex: ansible-playbook -i inventory/us-west -i inventory/us-east ome-device-info.yml

You could also use a dynamic inventory script to query your internal inventory or a 3rd party provider.

├── inventory
│   └── us-west
│       ├── group_vars
│       │   ├── all
│       │   │   └── 00_all.yml # Global variables, applies to all hosts
│       │   ├── mx-sleds.yml # Group variables, matches inventory group name
│       └── hosts # Static inventory file containing hosts and host_vars