Getting Started with Ansible Tower: Quick Install

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Hi Readers, we are very much familiar with Ansible and its usage. But today in this blog we will try to understand the basics of another version of Ansible, which is Ansible Tower. Ansible Tower is derived from the AWX project. We will learn the what and why of this tool in this blog.

What is Ansible Tower?

It is a web-based GUI tool, used for managing infrastructural configurations.
It is Ansible at a more enterprise level.
It is useful for centralizing infrastructure from a user interface with role-based access control(RBAC), job scheduling, and graphical inventory management.

What makes it special?

It has a user-friendly dashboard, useful for managing inventory dynamically.
It provides real-time job status by providing playbook status.
It has the capability to schedule a job.
It can send internal notifications by sending playbook status notifications to various channels, say Slack.
It provides role-based access control which strengthens the security of the infrastructure.
It has many more features like auditing job and tower resources, credentials storage, REST API, access to remote ad-hoc commands, and so on.

Installation

There are multiple ways to set up AnsibleTower including VirtualBox, Amazon ec2 instance, Vagrant, using docker, etc.

In this blog, we will be using Vagrant for the local setup.

Prerequisite

64-bit Linux OS.
20 GB HDD and 4 GB RAM.
Supported OS: RHEL, CentOS.
A Redhat account. (Free tier is good for beginners)A

Setting up an RHEL virtual machine using Vagrant

Run these commands to setup the tower on vagrant

~/Tower$vagrant init ansible/tower

~/Tower$vagrant up --provider virtualbox

~/Tower$vagrant ssh

This will show output something like this. It contains the username and password used to login into WebUI.

Login to Tower WebUI using the credentials

Import license from the Redhat account

You must have an account at Redhat, and enter its login credentials at the #license page to get a subscription.
You may get some errors if using Ansible Tower version 3.8 or above. https://access.redhat.com/solutions/4996571
Follow this to resolve it,
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-tower/latest/html/userguide/import_license.html

Once you have a valid license, it will allow you to the homepage for Ansible Tower WebUI.

That’s all for this blog. Hope you found some information from this. In case of any queries you can contact me over my email id nitin.mishra@knoldus.com. To read my other blogs click this.