I'm setting up a lab with a bunch of VMs, and each of these VMs will serve one of a set of purposes (mostly servers). In setting up each one, I'm keeping detailed notes of exactly what I have installed, configuration changes I have made, etc. The setup process is tedious enough that even with detailed notes, I'm not excited at the prospect of having to rebuild one of these. Ideally I would like to be able to delete and quickly rebuild a particular machine from the ground up as quickly as possible.
A friend recommended Ansible as the solution to this. I've been reading the introduction docs, and it looks like Ansible is exactly what I have been looking for - My Ansible "Playbooks/Plays/Tasks/Modules" would then *become *my detailed notes, and I would get the added benefit of being able to version them as well. Here is what I *think* I want to do so far, but I want to make sure I'm going down the right path before I get too far down it. Suppose for example that I need two "Mailserver" type server VMs, one "Desktop" type VM, and three "Database" servers. Each of those quoted "types" has its own set of services which need to be set up, daemons configured, and various other tweaks. Am I correct that what I want to do here is set up one "Playbook", which contains a "Play" for each of these types? And each of those "Plays" would contain various tasks/modules to set the machine up in the desired configuration? Do "Roles" come into play here? Maybe I need a "Role" for each type, instead of a "Play"? Thanks! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ansible Project" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/813b38c2-793b-4779-ba3b-394a033ef23d%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
