Ansible is an open source community project by RedHat and is the simplest way to automate your IT. Ansible can be used across entire IT teams, ranging from systems administrators to network administrators to developers and managers. Ansible provides an enterprise-ready, task-based, agentless architecture automation solution for not only servers and software, but also networking starting in Ansible 2.1. Further, the Ansible backend makes extensive use of Python as you will inspect more on that later. Cisco is a major supported vender and here you will focus on Ansible networking automation specific to NDFC.

Step 1 - Login to the Ansible host

Log to the Ansible Server that we have setup for by clicking the below icon when prompted, the password is cisco.123.

Step 2 - Verify Ansible Install

In your terminal, verify Ansible is installed by checking the version. You'll be working with Ansible Core Version 2.14.11.

ansible --version

Upon a successful installation and verification of the Ansible version, your output should look as follows:

    ansible [core 2.14.11]
        config file = None
        configured module search path = ['/home/pod31u1/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
        ansible python module location = /usr/local/lib/python3.10/dist-packages/ansible
        ansible collection location = /home/pod31u1/.ansible/collections:/usr/share/ansible/collections
        executable location = /usr/local/bin/ansible
        python version = 3.10.12 (main, Nov 20 2023, 15:14:05) [GCC 11.4.0] (/usr/bin/python3)
        jinja version = 3.0.3
        libyaml = True

Step 3 - Install and Verify Ansible Collection for NDFC

Install and Verify the Ansible Collection for NDFC is installed as the correct version defined in your requirements YAML file.

ansible-galaxy collection install cisco.dcnm    
ansible-galaxy collection list | grep cisco.dcnm

    cisco.dcnm        2.4.0

Step 4 - Create a Directory for your Project

mkdir LTRDCN-2654
cd LTRDCN-2654
pwd

Step 5 - Create Directory for Ansible NDFC

In your Terminal window you should be at the top level of your project directory. Create a directory called ansible-ndfc, then change directory into your newly created playbooks directory.

mkdir ansible-ndfc
cd ansible-ndfc

Step 6 - Create Directories for Ansible NDFC

Within the ansible-ndfc directory create three more directories; group_vars, directories for both staging and prod under group_vars, roles, and collections. While you could reuse your previous Ansible directory, this is created to keep things separated for clarity and to demonstrate some other ways to work with file structures in Ansible.

mkdir group_vars
mkdir roles

Step 7 - Create Ansible Config File

Create an ansible.cfg file to disable hostkey checking and set your python interpreter for the purposes of this lab. Additionally, NDFC Ansible modules require the Ansible persistent_connection to have some values modified. The command_timeout and connect_timeout are required to be set to a 1000 seconds or greater. If this is something you forget to do in your environment outside of this lab, not to worry, the modules will notify you upon execution time.

touch /home/pod3u1/LTRDCN-2654/ansible-ndfc/ansible.cfg
cat <<EOF > /home/pod3u1/LTRDCN-2654/ansible-ndfc/ansible.cfg
[persistent_connection]
command_timeout=1000
connect_timeout=1000

EOF

Step 8 - Create VRF Role

Likewise, use Ansible Galaxy to create an empty role for creating additional overlays based on Ansible best practices.

ansible-galaxy init roles/create-overlay

    - Role roles/create-overlay was created successfully

Step 9 - Verify Ansible NDFC Directory Structure

View the ansible-ndfc directory structure by using tree. Install tree using apt-get. If asked for a password, enter cisco.123

tree roles/

    roles/
    └── create-overlay
        ├── README.md
        ├── defaults
        │   └── main.yml
        ├── files
        ├── handlers
        │   └── main.yml
        ├── meta
        │   └── main.yml
        ├── tasks
        │   └── main.yml
        ├── templates
        ├── tests
        │   ├── inventory
        │   └── test.yml
        └── vars
            └── main.yml
    
    9 directories, 8 files

Continue to the next section to create the variables needed for NDFC Ansible modules to onboard a new tenant overlay.