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Category Archives for "Systems"

VMworld 2015 Day 2 Keynote Liveblog

The day 2 keynote kicks off with another Cloud Academy presentation… After the video wraps up, Sanjay Poonen takes the stage. Poonen briefly recaps yesterday’s messaging, and then moves into the focus of today’s keynote—focusing on the “any application and any device” part of the “Ready for Any” messaging.

According to Poonen, the core of the solution for “any application on any device” is VMware’s Workspace Suite. Workspace Suite creates the magic of “enterprise computing with consumer simplicity.” How? It starts by building upon the core of virtualized infrastructure, made possibe by VMware’s compute, storage, and network virtualization solutions. Combined with a strong management layer and hybrid cloud solutions, this becomes the software-defined data center (SDDC). Somehow, though, this stuff needs to be connected to the end users—via desktop, mobile, content collaboration, and tying it all together with identity management. Poonen points to innovation in all of these areas.

Obviously, mobile is a category that is growing very rapidly, and Poonen talks about VMware’s movement in this space via the AirWatch acquisition. And the use of mobile devices is also key to VMware’s identity efforts as well. Poonen shows a video with a few customer testimonials, and then introduces Continue reading

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This is a liveblog for the Day 1 general session at VMworld 2015 in San Francisco. For many people, VMworld started yesterday with the Welcome Receptio in the Solutions Exchange, but today marks the official kick-off to the event. I’ll have to end this liveblog shortly before the general session ends in order to make it to some customer meetings.

The keynote kicks off with a short video about the VMware Cloud Academy, where both “legacy” and “cloud-native” apps can enjoy the Unified Hybrid Cloud. Following that video, Carl Eschenbach takes the stage (along with some “apps”). Eschenbach sets the stage for the session by talking about the momentum and volume of success that VMware has enjoyed (and continues to enjoy). He also calls out VMware’s philanthropic efforts, via the VMware Foundation and the #vGiveBack program.

Eschenbach nexts dives a bit deeper on the theme of the show, “Ready for Any.” This means VMware technologies and products supporting any application, any cloud, any infrastructure, any time, any place…you get the idea. This theme encompasses SDDC (software-defined data center) initiatives, mobility initiatives, and EUC (end-user computing) initiatives. Eschenbach talks in a a bit more detail about how Unified Hybrid Cloud Continue reading

Simplicity – the art of automation

SimplicityWhen I was a young lad I had my heart set of being a car designer when I grew up. This dream carried on into my teens, then for some reason it vanished. Around the same time I discovered I could 'work' computers, and that I quite enjoyed it.

Fast forward a great many years and I am looking back at over two decades of experience as an IT engineer. But my interest in design has never really waned - I still find great pleasure in things that have been designed well.

Just over six years ago I discovered the furniture manufacturer, Vitsœ. Although they started life as a Danish/German partnership they are now very much a British company - based in the UK with an Englishman at the helm. They produce a shelving system, called the 606, and I invested in some for my home office.

The 606 is extremely flexible in its usage, it can form an office space...

Office

or somewhere to keep a record collection...

Records

or even a kitchen...

Kitchen

Impressively, it also scales; from a small start...

Small

to massive installations...

Massive

But the most impressive thing about this bespoke shelving system is that it's not bespoke at all. Continue reading

Make Your Life Easier by Creating Utilities and Delegating Playbooks

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Last week we hosted our second session of the Tips & Tricks webinar series and focused on creating utilities and delegating playbooks. We want to make your life easier by helping you to automate tasks and then delegate the execution. Ansible is not a programming language, but you can use it as one. Here’s what you need to know…

#1 Create executables that someone else can use

Leverage the shebang (#!) and use ansible as you would any scripting language to create utilities that can reuse your existing playbooks, roles and task lists.

#2 Use permissions to segment access

Unix permissions (and ACLs) can be used to restrict access to inventory and to the users/keys needed to access the defined hosts. You can also restrict which utilities can be executed (sudo).

#3 Use Ansible to make ad-hoc systems

Ansible is a Unix tool, as such it can be combined with others (cron, incron, netcat, ucspi, etc) to create automated workflows.

Watch the entire webinar now.

If you missed Brian's first Tips & Tricks session on Live Systems, you can watch it here. 

Next up is Tips & Tricks: QA on September 17, at 3PM Eastern. Register now and Continue reading

Uncontaina-bull: The love for Ansible + Docker

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Here at Ansible, we normally leave it up to our good friend @Ansibull to deploy the puns. But having just joined Ansible in the past few weeks, I’ve been spending some time getting acquainted with the vast quantity of Ansible resources produced by the lovely folks in the community, and I have to say, the amount of great content out there is just…

In-cow-cula-bull.

This is especially great for those of us looking how to do Ansible + $justaboutanything: Ansible + OpenStack, Ansible + Drupal, Ansible + CoreOS, or, as you may have guessed, Ansible + Docker.

Of course, Ansible has some useful resources for how to use Docker with Ansible. But the beautiful thing about what all of our friends in the community are writing is that they’re sharing all the things they learned along the way, how it helped out their company or workplace, what puzzles they had to solve; basically, things you may run into yourself, or ideas that may be inspiring to you that you hadn’t thought of just yet.

And to not share those things with everyone else? That would be, ahem, unthinka-bull. So without further ado: Here’s just a little bit of the latest Continue reading

Recap: Docker 1.8 Online Meetup Series

Missed our three-part series of Docker Online Meetups on the Docker 1.8 release? Don’t worry! We recorded each session and posted the videos for you to watch.   Our series of Docker Online Meetups on the Docker 1.8 release started with Core Maintainer David Calavera presenting … Continued

Technology Short Take #53

Welcome to Technology Short Take #53. In this post, I’ve gathered links to posts about networking, virtualization, Docker, containers, Linux, configuration management, and all kinds of other cool stuff. Here’s hoping you find something useful!

Networking

  • Anthony Spiteri, who works at an Australian service provider running NSX, has some in-depth articles discussing vShield Edge and NSX Edge (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4). Anthony discusses features supported by both, how they handle high availability, how VPN services work, and how to handle certificates. It looks like very useful information for anyone supporting NSX in their environment.
  • Here’s a nice article on using Ansible with Arista EOS. This isn’t something I’ve had the chance to do just yet (currently needing to focus my efforts on Ansible with Linux/Cumulus Linux), but it certainly seems relatively straightforward. Without having done this myself, it seems like I’d prefer to run pyeapi on the switches directly, so the Ansible configuration remains clean (instead of having to use a local connection for the switches but SSH for everything else). Of course, I’m sure there are trade-offs each way.
  • I think I’ve mentioned this before (it’s really hard to Continue reading

6 Things You (Maybe) Don’t Know About Ansible

Ansible is a very flexible and extensible automation tool, and it can be used in a lot of different environments that may not fit your preconceived notions of Ansible as an SSH-based tool to configure Linux and Unix systems. Here are a few other things you can do with Ansible, and a few ways to further customize and configure how your automation works. I hope these tips are useful! If you have any of your own to share, feel free to send us a tweet @ansible!

1. Ansible can be used to manage more than just servers

Most Ansible playbooks are used to configure and manage servers. Web servers, database servers, and so on. But anything with an SSH interface or an API can be managed with Ansible, too. For example we have modules to talk to cloud platforms, Citrix NetScaler and F5 load balancers, and other networking equipment. These modules are really helpful for tasks like multi-server rolling upgrades or other complicated orchestration tasks that need coordination with your broader networking environment.

You can also implement custom connection plugins for those really weird or legacy devices. There are a number of lesser-known ones shipped with Ansible, including Continue reading

A New Galaxy

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We launched Galaxy back around the beginning of 2014 with the intent of creating a place for the community to find and share Ansible roles.

Since that time some truly amazing things have happened including: tremendous growth in the Ansible community, huge successes with Tower, and the steady growth of our company to name just a few. During this time Galaxy grew as well, reaching more than 16,000 users and over 3,000 Ansible roles.

Galaxy as a web site and an application, however, changed very little since the early part of 2014. The home page looks almost exactly as it did the day we launched the site. About the only thing we changed was removing the BETA label and maybe fixing a bug or two.

Well, I’m happy to announce that this is changing. Galaxy will now get the attention it deserves - the attention our community and users deserve. Starting 4 weeks ago we officially made the decision and commitment to treat Galaxy as a product. Galaxy is now on a regular release schedule, and we have a team in place, dedicated to building Galaxy. Our first release launches today. Yay!

From this point forward Ansible is committed to making Continue reading

Deploy to Metal? No sweat with RackN new Ansible Dynamic Inventory API

Untitled_designAt Ansible, we’ve been talking quite a bit with our friends at RackN about the work they’ve been doing to make things easier to stand up complex system configurations from bare metal. We’re happy to share some of what they’ve accomplished.

Deploy to Metal? No sweat with RackN new Ansible Dynamic Inventory API: by Greg DeK + Dan Choquette

The RackN team takes our already super easy Ansible integration to a new level with added SSH Key control and dynamic inventory with the recent OpenCrowbar v2.3 (Drill) release. These two items make full metal control more accessible than ever for Ansible users.

The platform offers full key management.  You can add keys at the system, deployment (group of machines) and machine levels. These keys are operator settable and can be added and removed after provisioning has been completed.  If you want to control access to groups on a servers or group of server basis, OpenCrowbar provides that control via our API, CLI and UI.

We also provide a API path for Ansible dynamic inventory.  Using the simple Python client script (reference example), you can instantly a complete upgraded node inventory of your system.  The inventory data includes items Continue reading

NGINX and Ansible

nginxKevin Jones (@WebOpsX) wrote a nice post over on the NGINX blog about installing NGINX and NGINX Plus with Ansible.

One of my favorite features of Ansible is that it is completely clientless. To manage a system, a connection is made over SSH, using either Paramiko (a Python library) or native OpenSSH. Another attractive feature of Ansible is its extensive selection of modules. These modules can be used to perform some of the common tasks of a system administrator. In particular, they make Ansible a powerful tool for installing and configuring any application across multiple servers, environments, and operating systems, all from one central location.

Here are a few NGINX Ansible Galaxy Roles

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/466

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/551

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/471

https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/1580

 

 

 

Read the full post here: Installing NGINX and NGINX Plus With Ansible

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