Ansible Network Automation

Lab Overview

In this lab you will you Ansible commands and playbooks to explore and reconfigure a pair of Cisco routers in a cloud environment.

This will expose you to using Ansible to connect to, explore, and configure Network Devices. We will introduce you to the communications plugin network_cli and core Networking Modules including ios_facts, ios_config,cli_config, ios_command, and cli_command. In addition throughout the labs we hope to show you common features, elements, practices, and patterns in Ansible Playbook usage.

Lab Outline

• Part 1: Explore the environment with Ansible

  • Explore the environment with shell and Ansible commands

  • Investigate Ansible’s configuration and Inventory

  • Connect to the Cisco Routers using Ansible

• Part 2: Backup, Configure, and Explore the Routers facts

  • Use the ios_config Module in a Playbook to backup the routers

  • Use the ios_command Module to investigate the router configuration

  • Use the ios_config Module to start reconfiguration of the routers

• Part 3: Reconfigure the Routers to connect 2 sites

  • Use a Playbook with cli_config to create a GRE Tunnel

  • Use a Playbook with various networking modules to configure routing

  • Use ios_config to restore routers using the backups you created

  • Create a site.yml to automate all previous stages into a single Playbook

• Bonus

  • Create various Roles to better structure Parts 2 and 3 above

  • Explore router configuration files and how to use with cli_config