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Network Automation Cookbook

By Karim Okasha
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  1. Free Chapter
    Managing Cisco IOS Devices Using Ansible
About this book
Network Automation Cookbook is designed to help system administrators, network engineers, and infrastructure automation engineers to centrally manage switches, routers, and other devices in their organization's network. This book will help you gain hands-on experience in automating enterprise networks and take you through core network automation techniques using the latest version of Ansible and Python. With the help of practical recipes, you'll learn how to build a network infrastructure that can be easily managed and updated as it scales through a large number of devices. You'll also cover topics related to security automation and get to grips with essential techniques to maintain network robustness. As you make progress, the book will show you how to automate networks on public cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure. Finally, you will get up and running with Ansible 2.9 and discover troubleshooting techniques and network automation best practices. By the end of this book, you'll be able to use Ansible to automate modern network devices and integrate third-party tools such as NAPALM, NetBox, and Batfish easily to build robust network automation solutions.
Publication date:
April 2020
Publisher
Packt
Pages
482
ISBN
9781789956481

 

Managing Cisco IOS Devices Using Ansible

In this chapter, we will outline how to automate Cisco IOS-based devices using Ansible. We will explore the different modules available in Ansible to automate configuration and collect network information from Cisco IOS devices. This chapter will be based on the following sample network diagram, and we will walk through how we can implement this network design using Ansible:

The following table outlines the management IP addresses on the Cisco nodes, which Ansible will use to connect to the devices:

Device

Role

Vendor

MGMT Port

MGMT IP

access01

Access switch

Cisco IOS 15.1

Ethernet0/0

172.20.1.18

access02

Access switch

Cisco IOS 15.1

Ethernet0/0

172.20.1.19

core01

Core switch

Cisco IOS 15.1

Ethernet0/0

172.20.1.20

core02

Core switch

Cisco IOS 15.1

Ethernet0/0

172.20.1.21

wan01

WAN router

Cisco IOS–XE 16.6.1

GigabitEthernet1

172.20.1.22

wan02

WAN router

Cisco IOS–XE 16.6.1

GigabitEthernet1

172.20.1.23

The main recipes covered in this chapter are as follows:

  • Building an Ansible network inventory
  • Connecting to Cisco IOS devices
  • Configuring basic system information
  • Configuring interfaces on IOS devices
  • Configuring L2 VLANS on IOS devices
  • Configuring trunk and access interfaces
  • Configuring interface IP addresses
  • Configuring OSPF on IOS devices
  • Collecting IOS device facts
  • Validating network reachability on IOS devices
  • Retrieving operational data from IOS devices
  • Validating network states with pyATS and Ansible
 

Technical requirements

 

Building an Ansible network inventory

In this recipe, we will outline how to build and structure the Ansible inventory to describe the network setup outlined in the previous section.

Getting ready

Make sure that Ansible is already installed on the control machine.

How to do it...

  1. Create a new directory with the following name: ch2_ios.
  2. Inside this new folder, create the hosts file with the following content:
$ cat hosts
 [access]
 access01 Ansible_host=172.20.1.18
 access02 Ansible_host=172.20.1.19

[core]
 core01 Ansible_host=172.20.1.20
 core02 Ansible_host=172.20.1.21

[wan]
 wan01 Ansible_host=172.20.1.22
 wan02 Ansible_host=172.20.1.23

[lan:children]
 access
 core

[network:children]
 lan
 wan
  1. Create the Ansible.cfg file with the following content:
$ cat Ansible.cfg

[defaults]
 inventory=hosts
 retry_files_enabled=False
 gathering=explicit

How it works...

We built the Ansible inventory using the hosts file, and we defined multiple groups in order to group the different devices in our topology in the following manner:

  • We created the access group, which has both access switches (access01 and access02) in our topology.
  • We created the core group, which groups all core switches that will act as the L3 termination for all the VLANs on the access switches.
  • We created the wan group, which groups all our Cisco IOS–XE routes, which will act as our wan routers.
  • We created another group called lan, which groups both access and core groups.
  • We created the network group, which groups both lan and wan groups.

Finally, we created the Ansible.cfg file and configured it to point to our hosts file to be used as an Ansible inventory file. We disabled the setup module, which is not required when running Ansible against network nodes.

                     
About the Author
  • Karim Okasha

    Karim Okasha is a network consultant with over 15 years of experience in the ICT industry. He is specialized in the design and operation of large telecom and service provider networks and has lots of experience in network automation. Karim has a bachelor's degree in telecommunications and holds several expert-level certifications, such as CCIE, JNCIE, and RHCE. He is currently working in Red Hat as a network automation consultant, helping large telecom and service providers to design and implement innovative network automation solutions. Prior to joining Red Hat, he worked for Saudi Telecom Company as well as Cisco and Orange S.A.

    Browse publications by this author
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