Ansible and IBM Power Systems

IBM Power Systems is a family of enterprise servers that helps transform your organization by delivering industry leading resilience, scalability and accelerated performance for the most sensitive, mission critical workloads and next-generation AI and edge solutions. The Power platform also leverages open source technologies that enable you to run these workloads in a hybrid cloud environment with consistent tools, processes and skills.

IBM Power Systems and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

IT administrators, developers and QA engineers are continuously seeking opportunities to streamline and automate anything repetitive to save time, increase reliability and minimize human error. In a hybrid multicloud landscape, streamlining starts with establishing consistent tools and processes across all environments.

This is why Red HatⓇ Ansible Automation Platform is enabled for IBM Power Systems — across AIX and IBM i, environments running on Power Systems private and public cloud infrastructures. Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Power Systems helps you include workloads on Power platform as part of your wider enterprise automation strategy through the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform ecosystem. Enterprises already using Ansible for other IT infrastructure (such as x86 or IBM Z servers) can seamlessly integrate Power servers as well. The Ansible content helps enable DevOps automation through unified workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one, easy-to-use platform. This is an important step to delivering a comprehensive enterprise-grade solution for building and operating IT automation at scale.

A core value of Ansible is that it can work with just about everything. Integrate with what you have or build new playbooks with certified or open source content to create something new. IBM has created an extensive set of Ansible modules for the Power Systems user community, ranging from operating system management to cloud management and everything in between.

Solution Benefits

Consistency

• Enable consistent enterprise automation strategy across
• AIX and IBM i environments
• Hybrid applications and infrastructure management

Transparency

• Enable complete visibility of Power Systems automation across AIX and IBM i environments
• Use best practices to manage automation in source control to move towards infrastructure as code
• Contribute to breaking down silos between IT teams

Skills

• Use Ansible and Python skills, which are readily available and can be applied to AIX and IBM i environments
• Use modules to codify key maintenance and operational tasks for AIX and IBM i software so that you can focus on business priorities.

Ansible Use Cases

• OS configuration management – AIX and IBM i 
• Patching (e.g. service packs and PTFs)
• User and group management
• Boot management
• Running commands and SQL queries