VMware template creation can be automated using packer. VMware Virtual Machine deployments are very faster because of the template based VM build. But due to rapid development and fast-paced Operating system releases, we might need to build multiple templates and keep it ready for deployment. A customer might ask different operating system release and you […]
Jenkins – Ansible – Configure Dynamic Inventory
Are you using Jenkins as front-end GUI for Ansible Automation? Have you ever tried the dynamic inventory in Jenkin’s Ansible plugin? Ansible Inventory can be created using the plugin’s dynamic inventory feature. This feature could be very useful when you want to pass hosts as user-defined input and that’s is not part any of the […]
Jenkins – Store Console Output in Linux Filesystem – Artifacts
How to store Jenkins job’s console output in another system? There are much opensource software is available to store the logs and retrieve logs in time. Jfrog is one of the most famous artifact solutions. Here, we will be using native Linux/Unix commands to pull the Jenkins logs and store it in local/NFS filesystem for […]
Jenkins – Rename Build Job Names – Build Name setter
Jenkins job’s build name would be named with the numeric number by default in increment manner. After configuring the Jenkins job, the first build job would be named as “1”, the second job would be named as “2” and so on. Most of the cases, no one prefers to change the default build naming algorithm. […]
Jenkins Console – Xterm Terminal – Colorized Ansible playbook Output
This artcile will walk through the installing and configuring Ansicolor plugin in Jenkins to make colorized output in ansible playbook stdout. Jenkins console is very plain and simple. If you are using Jenkins to run the ansible playbook, you might notice that colorful output might be missing. Ansible Tower/AWX offers the colorful stdout in the […]
Ansible – Configure Windows servers as Ansible Client – winrm
Ansible is not just for Linux. It can also be used for Windows servers automation. This article will explain how to prepare windows servers for Ansible automation. Ansible uses WinRM protocol to establish a connection with Windows hosts. (i.e Linux/Unix like hosts uses SSH protocol). Ansible requires PowerShell 3.0 or newer and at least .NET […]
Jenkins – Passing Extra variables for Ansible Playbook
Ansible Playbooks are often written with many extra variables to pass the human inputs. In Ansible Tower /AWX, “SURVEY” feature is used to pass the extra variable to the playbook. If you are using Jenkins as your front-end graphical interface, you might be wondering how to pass the ansible extra variable. This article will walk […]
Ansible Engine – Run Playbook using Jenkins – GUI
Can’t afford Ansible Tower? Worried about AWX stability (Open Source Ansible Tower’s upstream Project )? Jenkins is more than enough to run the Ansible playbook from GUI. Ansible Tower’s main selling point is RBAC (Role based access control), credentials encryption and REST API. When you use Jenkins, it has plenty of plugins to offer role-based […]
Backup/Restore – Ansible AWX – tower-cli
How to Backup Ansible AWX? Ansible Tower comes along with “setup.sh“ to backup the database. If you are using the AWX (Ansible Tower’s upstream project), you could leverage tower-cli to take the object backups in the JSON format. You could also try this for Ansible Tower if the number of hosts are less than 100. […]
Packer Automation – Build Redhat/CentOS VM on VMware vSphere
In this article, we will be walking through the building of Redhat Enterprise Linux 7/CentOS 7 VM using ISO on VMware vSphere environment. Packer is very useful to build your base images on the cloud and on-premise. Packer is an opensource tool and developed by HashiCorp. HashiCorp owns very famous tools like Vagrant, Consul, and […]