# Create the Ansible node on Fedora
It is recommended that you deploy the Ansible controller on Fedora, to take advantage of the built-in support for Python 3. The solution requires Fedora 31 and Ansible 2.8.5. It may be possible to run the playbooks on other operating systems including RHEL and CentOS but the playbooks have only been tested on Fedora. In addition to Python 3 and Ansible 2.8.5, a number of other packages must be also be installed, as outlined below.
The playbooks should be run from a non-privileged account. HPE recommends that you use an account named core
as
this will ensure consistency with deployed CoreOS machines that have a built-in account core
. In addition, any
non-CoreOS VMs created by the playbooks will have a user account created with the same name as the user on
the Ansible controller node that ran the playbooks.
# Create the Fedora VM
Create a Virtual Machine with the following characteristics:
- Guest OS: Red Hat Fedora Server 31 (64-bit)
- Disk: 50G (thin provisioning)
- CPU: 2
- RAM: 4 GB
- Ethernet Adapter: VMXNET3, connected to your Ansible or management network
Install Fedora Server 31 using the x64 64-bit ISO image.
In the Software Selection
section, choose:
- Base Environment: Fedora Server Edition
- Add-Ons for Selected Environment: Guest Agent
Select your language, keyboard layout, and timezone settings and re-boot when the installation finishes. Configure your networking and check your connectivity before moving on to the next section.
# Password-less sudo
Configure password-less sudo
for the core
user on the Ansible controller node by logging in
as root
and issuing the command:
$ usermod -a -G wheel core
The default /etc/sudoers
file contains two lines for the group wheel
. As the root user, run visudo
to uncomment
the %wheel line containing the string NOPASSWD:
and comment out the other %wheel line. When you are done,
it should look like this:
## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands
#%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
## Same thing without a password
%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
The advantage of using visudo
is that it will validate the changes to the file.
# Install Ansible and required modules
Log in to the Ansible controller node as the core
user and run the following commands to install git
, ansible-2.8.5
and the required Python dependencies:
$ sudo dnf update -y --exclude=ansible
$ sudo dnf install -y git ansible-2.8.5 python3-netaddr python3-requests python3-pyvmomi
Note: Ansible 2.9.1
has a known issues that causes the cluster deployment to fail. The tested and recommended version of Ansible is 2.8.5
. Versions newer than 2.9.1
may work but have not been tested.