Install Ansible on Red Hat Linux | How to setup Ansible on Red Hat Linux VM | Ansible install on Azure Linux Virtual Machine | Ansible Azure Integration

How to setup Ansible on Red Hat Linux VM and Integrate with Azure Cloud?

Ansible is #1 configuration management tool. It can also be used for infrastructure provisioning as well. or You can use Ansible in combination of Terraform which can take care of infra automation and Ansible can do configuration management. We will be setting up Ansible on Red Hat VM in Azure cloud And create some resources in Azure Cloud by using Ansible playbooks.

 

Ansible Architecture:

 

The best way to install Ansible in Linux is to use PIP, a package manager for Python.

Pre-requisites:

• Create new Red Hat VM in Azure Cloud for setting up Ansible, just open port 22 in firewall rule.
• Install Azure CLI on Red Hat Linus VM
• Service principal to create any resources in Azure cloud using Azure CLI

How to setup Ansible on Red Hat Linux VM

Watch Steps in YouTube channel:

Change host name to AnsibleMgmtNode
sudo hostnamectl set-hostname AnsibleMgmtNode

Update Repository
sudo yum update -y

Install Python-pip3

sudo yum install python3-pip -y

Upgrade pip3 sudo pip3 install --upgrade pip

# Install Ansible pip3 install "ansible==2.9.17"

check Ansible version

ansible --version

# Install Ansible azure_rm module for interacting with Azure.

pip3 install ansible[azure]

Authenticate with Azure

To configure Azure credentials, you need the following information:

• Your Azure subscription ID and tenant ID
• The service principal application ID and secret

Create an Azure Service Principal

Login to Azure first

az login

Enter Microsoft credentials

Run the following commands to create an Azure Service Principal:

az ad sp create-for-rbac --name <service-principal-name> \ 

--role Contributor \ 

--scopes /subscriptions/<subscription_id>

Save the above output in a file as you will not be able retrieve later.
Configure the Ansible credentials using one of the following techniques:

• Option 1: Create an Ansible credentials file

• Option 2: Define Ansible environment variables

Option 1: Create Ansible credentials file

In this section, you create a local credentials file to provide credentials to Ansible. For security reasons, credential files should only be used in development environments.

mkdir ~/.azure 

vi ~/.azure/credentials

Insert the following lines into the file. Replace the placeholders with the service principal values.

[default] subscription_id=<subscription_id> client_id=<service_principal_app_id> secret=<service_principal_password> tenant=<service_principal_tenant_id>

Option 2: Define Ansible environment variables

On the host virtual machine, export the service principal values to configure your Ansible credentials.

export AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID=<subscription_id> export AZURE_CLIENT_ID=<service_principal_app_id> export AZURE_SECRET=<service_principal_password> export AZURE_TENANT=<service_principal_tenant_id>

Test Ansible installation

You now have a virtual machine with Ansible installed and configured!

This section shows how to create a test resource group within your new Ansible configuration. If you don't need to do that, you can skip this section.

• Option 1: Use an ad-hoc ansible command
• Option 2: Write and run an Ansible playbook

Option 1: Use an ad-hoc ansible command

Run the following ad-hoc Ansible command to create a resource group:

ansible localhost -m azure_rm_resourcegroup -a "name=my-rg123 location=eastus"

Option 2: Write and run an Ansible playbook

Create a simple playbook to create resource group in Azure.

sudo vi create-rg.yml

---

- hosts: localhost

  connection: local

  tasks:

    - name: Creating resource group

      azure_rm_resourcegroup:

        name: "myResourceGroup"

        location: "eastus"

Execute the playbook using ansible-playbook command.

ansible-playbook create-rg.yml

Now Login to Azure cloud to see if the resource group have been created.

Clean up Resources

Save the following code as delete-rg.yml

sudo vi delete-rg.yml

--- - hosts: localhost tasks: - name: Deleting resource group - "{{ name }}" azure_rm_resourcegroup: name: "{{ name }}" state: absent register: rg - debug: var: rg

ansible-playbook delete-rg.yml --extra-vars "name=myResourceGroup"

check in Azure cloud to see if the resource group have been deleted.