So far, we have been playing with virtual networking for one virtual machine, connected to the host. Now let us see how we can establish virtual networks connecting more than one machine. Lab3: Virtualbox host-only networking with more than one machine In this lab, we will connect two virtual machines that both use host-only networking. … Continue reading Virtual networking labs – VirtualBox internal networks and bridges
When you work with virtualized environments, you will sooner or later realize that a large part of the complexity of such environments originates in the networking part. Networking itself is a non-trivial endeavor, and in the context of cloud and virtualization technology, you often stack different virtualization layers on top of each other. To provide … Continue reading Virtual networking labs – NAT and host-only networking with VirtualBox
Terraform is one of the most popular open source tools to quickly provision complex cloud based infrastructures, and Ansible is a powerful configuration management tool. Time to see how we can combine them to easily create cloud based infastructures in a defined state. Terraform - a quick introduction This post is not meant to be … Continue reading Using Terraform and Ansible to manage your cloud environments
When you browse the module list of Ansible, you will find that the by far largest section is the list of cloud modules, i.e. modules to interact with a cloud environments to define, provision and maintain objects like virtual machines, networks, firewalls or storage. These modules make it easy to access the APIs of virtually … Continue reading Automating provisioning with Ansible – building cloud environments
When building more sophisticated Ansible playbooks, you will find that a linear execution is not always sufficient, and the need for more advanced control structures and ways to organize your playbooks arises. In this post, we will cover the corresponding mechanisms that Ansible has up its sleeves. Loops Ansible allows you to build loops that … Continue reading Automating provisioning with Ansible – control structures and roles
So far, we have used Ansible inventories more or less as a simple list of nodes. But there is much more you can do with inventories - you can assign hosts to groups, build hierarchies of groups, use dynamic inventories and assign variables. In this post, we will look at some of these options. Groups … Continue reading Automating provisioning with Ansible – working with inventories
In the playbooks that we have considered so far, we have used tasks, links to the inventory and modules. In this post, we will add another important feature of Ansible to our toolbox - variables. Declaring variables Using variables in Ansible is slightly more complex than you might expect at the first glance, mainly due … Continue reading Automating provisioning with Ansible – variables and facts
