Campus Data Center Automation: Generate, Deploy, Validate

Purpose:
This session will focus on using Ansible Tower to bring up switches as part of the initial deployment. After the switches are plugged in, launching the Ansible Tower job will dynamically generate a customized configuration for each switch and push it to the device.

Background:
This setup utilizes Ansible Tower as the front-end automation execution tool and leverages the Ansible inventory system to classify whether a switch is “allowed” on the network, the switch’s location, and the switch’s roles.

This session will explain how to set up the inventory, groups, and configuration templates using Jinja and Ansible. This involves in-depth instructions on customizing the device configuration based on the device’s location, model, and roles, in order to specify attributes such as the hostname, VLANs, and IP addresses.

After the initial deployment, Ansible Tower can be used to schedule jobs to identify any switches that have deviated from the golden configuration, and safely push the correct configurations to return the switches to their desired states.

Through this process, Ansible Tower is shown to be an excellent network automation engine to deploy and configure multiple switches in a short period of time.

Setup:
This session will demonstrate how automation of switch deployment and configuration maintenance can be achieved using Aruba switches and Aruba Ansible modules, as well as Ansible Tower.

The Aruba Ansible modules are currently located in this Aruba public GitHub repo: 
https://github.com/aruba/aruba-ansible-modules

Slides here.