This video walks user through the steps involved in using Ansible Tower to automate the process of RHEL 7 patching.
All relevant playbooks can be found at https://github.com/eanylin/ansible-lab/tree/master/vm_patching_demo
The video starts off by showing the existing environment with 2 VMWare ESXi hosts, Red Hat Satellite 6.4.1, RHEL 7.6 VM and Ansible Tower 3.4.0 cluster (Ansible Engine 2.7.5). We will make use of Ansible Tower to create a snapshot of the RHEL 7 VM before patching. The entire workflow will be driven by Ansible Tower.
Detailed Workflow:
1) Red Hat Satellite is an infrastructure management product that is specifically designed to keep Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) environments and other Red Hat infrastructure from running efficiently, with security and compliant with various standards.
2) Web application server 1, which is running on RHEL 7.6, have 17 Security and 8 Bug Fixes that need to be resolved (total of 25 Errata)
3) The Linux Engineer logs into the Ansible Tower. The ‘VM_Patching_Demo’ project shows that it is making use of Git to retrieve the required playbooks. The inventory is empty initially, with VMWare vCenter as the dynamic inventory source.
4) The engineer will start the inventory sync process to retrieve VM information from VMWare vCenter. Information of the VMs in vCenter get loaded into Ansible Tower and information such as the resourcepool that the VMs are using will get retrieved.
5) The engineer will proceed to execute the ‘Update_RHEL_VM_Packages’ workflow. He/She will make use of the survey form to pass in all the required information, e.g. information of the datacenter, vm name, inventory group, snapshot name and the list of packages to be updated. Once all the information has been filled in, a preview window will pop up and he/she will review the information before hitting the launch button.
6) Ansible Tower will proceed to create the VM snapshot and update all the NetworkManager related packages in a single workflow
7) The engineer will make use of Satellite to recalculate the list of Errata and we can see that it has reduced from 25 to 18
source
