Rancher on HPE SimpliVity

# 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 2.9.5. 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 2.9.5, a number of other packages must be also be installed, as outlined below.

The playbooks should be run from a non-privileged account - in the subsequent instructions, a user named rancher will be used.

# 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 rancher user on the Ansible controller node by logging in as root and issuing the command:

$ usermod -a -G wheel rancher

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 rancher user and run the following commands to install git, ansible and the required Python dependencies:

$ sudo dnf update -y 
$ sudo dnf install -y git ansible python3-netaddr python3-requests python3-pyvmomi

# Configuring proxy for the Ansible controller

The Ansible controller should be configured to match the proxy requirements for your environment. This can be done, for example, by adding a proxy entry to the /etc/dnf/dnf.conf file or by setting system-wide proxy settings in the /etc/environment file.

The following is an example of how to configure a proxy server in the /etc/dnf/dnf.conf file:

[main]
gpgcheck=1
installonly_limit=3
clean_requirements_on_remove=True
best=False
skip_if_unavailable=True
proxy=http://web-proxy.hpecloud.org:8080

← Ansible configuration →