VMware Aria Automation 8.16

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What Is configuration management in
Automation Assembler

Automation Assembler
 supports integration with Puppet Enterprise, Ansible Open Source, and Ansible Tower so that you can manage deployments for configuration and drift.

Puppet Integration

To integrate Puppet-based configuration management, you must have a valid instance of Puppet Enterprise installed on a public or private cloud with a
vSphere
 workload. You must establish a connection between this external system and your
Automation Assembler
 instance. Then you can make Puppet configuration management available to
Automation Assembler
 by adding it to appropriate blueprints.
The
Automation Assembler
 blueprint service Puppet provider installs, configures, and runs the Puppet agent on a deployed compute resource. The Puppet provider supports both SSH and WinRM connections with the following prerequisites:
  • SSH connections:
    • The user name must be either a super user or a user with sudo permissions to run commands with
      NOPASSWD
      .
    • Deactivate
      requiretty
       for the given user.
    • cURL must be available on the deployment compute resource.
  • WinRM connections:
    • PowerShell 2.0 must be available on the deployment compute resource.
    • Configure the Windows template as described in the
      Automation Orchestrator
       documentation.
The DevOps administrator is responsible for managing the connections to a Puppet master and for applying Puppets roles, or configuration rules, to specific deployments. Following deployment, virtual machines configured to support configuration management are registered with the designated Puppet Master.
When virtual machines are deployed, users can add or delete a Puppet Master as an external system or update projects assigned to the Puppet Master. Finally, appropriate users can de-register deployed virtual machines from the Puppet Master when the machines are decommissioned.

Ansible Open Source Integration

When setting up an Ansible integration, install Ansible Open Source in accordance with the Ansible installation instructions. See the Ansible documentation for more information about installation.
Ansible enables host key checking by default. If a host is reinstalled with a different key in the
known_hosts
 file, an error message appear. If a host is not listed in the
known_hosts
 file, you must supply the key on start-up. You can deactivate host key checking with the following setting in the
/etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
 or
~/.ansible.cfg
 file:
[defaults]
host_key_checking = False
localhost_warning = False
 
[paramiko_connection]
record_host_keys = False
 
[ssh_connection]
#ssh_args = -C -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=60s
ssh_args = -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
To avoid the host key checking errors, set
host_key_checking
 and
record_host_keys
 to False including adding an extra option
UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
 set in
ssh_args
.In addition, if the inventory is empty initially, Ansible warns that the host list is empty. This causes the playbook syntax check to fail.
Ansible vault enables you to store sensitive information, such as passwords or keys, in encrypted files rather than as plain text. Vault is encrypted with a password. In
Automation Assembler
, Ansible uses Vault to encrypt data such as ssh passwords for host machines. It assumes that the path to the Vault password has been set.
You can modify the
ansible.cfg
 file to specify the location of the password file using the following format. 
vault_password_file = /
path to
/file.txt
You can also set the
ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE
 environment variable so that Ansible automatically searches for the password. For example,
ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE=~/.vault_pass.txt
Automation Assembler
 manages the Ansible inventory file, so you must ensure that the
Automation Assembler
 user has rwx access on the inventory file. 
cat ~/var/tmp/vmware/provider/user_defined_script/$(ls -t ~/var/tmp/vmware/provider/user_defined_script/ | head -1)/log.txt
If you want to use a non-root user with
Automation Assembler
 open-source integration, the users require a set of permissions to run the commands used by the
Automation Assembler
 open-source provider. The following commands must be set in the user's sudoers file.
Defaults:myuser !requiretty
If the user is not part of an admin group that has no askpass application specified, set the following command in the user's sudoers file.
myuser ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
If you encounter errors or other problems when setting up Ansible integration, refer to the
log.txt
 file at
'cat~/var/tmp/vmware/provider/user_defined_script/$(ls -t ~/var/tmp/vmware/provider/user_defined_script/ | head -1)/'
 on the Ansible Control Machine.

Ansible Tower Integration

Supported Operating System Types
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 or later 64-bit (x86), supports only Ansible Tower 3.5 and greater.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 or later 64-bit (x86).
  • CentOS 7.4 or later 64-bit (x86).
The following is a sample inventory file, which is generated during an Ansible Tower installation. You may need to modify it for
Automation Assembler
 integration uses.
[root@cava-env8-dev-001359 ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.5.2-1.el8]# pwd
 
/root/ansible-tower-install/ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.5.2-1.el8
 
[root@cava-env8-dev-001359 ansible-tower-setup-bundle-3.5.2-1.el8]# cat inventory
 
[tower]
 
localhost ansible_connection=local
 
 
 
 
[database]
 
 
 
 
[all:vars]
 
admin_password='VMware1!'
 
 
 
 
pg_host=''
 
pg_port=''
 
 
 
 
pg_database='awx'
 
pg_username='awx'
 
pg_password='VMware1!'
 
 
 
 
rabbitmq_port=5672
 
rabbitmq_vhost=tower
 
rabbitmq_username=tower
 
rabbitmq_password='VMware1!'
 
rabbitmq_cookie=cookiemonster
 
 
 
 
# Needs to be true for fqdns and ip addresses
 
rabbitmq_use_long_name=false
 
 
 
 
# Isolated Tower nodes automatically generate an RSA key for authentication;
 
# To deactivate this behavior, set this value to false
 
# isolated_key_generation=true

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