• Table of contents below Intro, for Tools and Docs

RED HAT MANAGEMENT PORTFOLIO

In every environment there is a core set of servers/services that are required to allow your users to interface with the systems they use daily in seamless operation. The Red Hat Management Portfolio can provide you with the tools you need from a User Front End, Provisioning, Orchestration, Automation, and Management for your environment. These systems will allow you to provide that next level of IT service to your end users/customers.

My work is focused on:

• Ansible Tower
• Satellite
• InSights

The key to success is always in the planning! The Venn diagram below depicts the primary functions between tools and the overlap between to help you decide where you would like to situate the functions, and assist in integrating the tools within your IT environment(s)

Satellite:

The easiest way to manage your Red Hat infrastructure for efficient and compliant IT operations. Establish trusted content repos and processes that help you build a standards-based, secure Red Hat environment.

Ansible Tower:

Simple, agentless automation platform that can improve your current processes, migrate apps for better optimization, and provide a single language for DevOps practices across your organization. Ansible Tower by Red Hat is a centralized API for your Ansible automation and a graphical user interface for Ansible.

InSights:

A predictive analytic tool with real-time, in-depth analysis of your Red Hat infrastructure, letting you predict and prevent problems before they occur.

Working in tandem, this is what the optimal Management system would look like from a Red Hat perspective.

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1. Ansible and Ansible Tower

    While the upstream Ansible community is known for fast-moving innovations, many enterprises
    require a more secure, stable and reliable approach. With Ansible Engine, organizations
    can access the tools and innovations available from the underlying Ansible technology in a
    hardened, enterprise-grade manner. Ansible Engine relies on the massive, global community 
    behind the Ansible project, and adds in the capabilities and assurance from Red Hat that 
    your business requires in order to comfortably adopt organization-wide automation, and 
    at any scale you can bring. 

Community vs. Enterprise

    Both the Ansible project and Ansible Engine are open source technologies. The Ansible project
    is built by the community (ansible.com/community) for the benefit of the community. 
    Ansible Engine is developed by Red Hat with the explicit intent of being used as an 
    enterprise IT platform.

    Automation requires an investment in time, technology, and people. Make the most of your 
    investment with an enterprise automation platform that delivers supportability, agility
    and flexibility.

Ansible Tower

    Solve problems once. Scale automation with control and insight. Collaborate across teams. 
    Manage policy enforcement and governance. Bring the power of automation to your whole 
    organization.

    With Red Hat Ansible Tower you can centralize and control your IT infrastructure with a visual
    dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications and graphical 
    inventory management. Easily embed Ansible Tower into existing tools and processes with REST 
    API and CLI.

Ansible and Ansible Tower should be the linchpin in your Enterprise and the foundation for your your journey into automation

Ansible Features:

• Simple
• Powerful - hundreds of use cases
• Agentless
• Cross platform – Linux, Windows, UNIX, IoT, etc...
• Human readable - anyone can do it (no coding skills required)
• Perfect description of application - less time on documentation required
• Version controlled
• Dynamic inventories
• Orchestration that plays well with others – hp sa, puppet, Jenkins, rhnss, etc.
• The language of DevOps

Ansible Tower Features:

• Ansible Tower Editions Standard vs Premium
• Easy to understand and clean dashboard
• Real-time job status updates
• Multi-playbook workflows
• Easy to see who ran what job when
• Scale capacity with tower clusters
• Integrated notifications
• Schedule ansible jobs
• Manage and track your entire inventory - Static or DYNAMIC INVENTORIES
• Self-service it... simplified
• Remote command execution
• Comprehensive rest API and tower CLI tool
• Role Based Access Control
• LDAP, AD, and other authentication integration
• Made easy config for your logging aggragator

Ways To Interact With Ansible:

AD-Hoc

Playbooks

Roles

Ansible Collections https://www.ansible.com/blog/getting-started-with-ansible-collections

• Certified Content in Ansible Automation Hub https://access.redhat.com/articles/3642632

   New content is continuously made available for consumption. Managing content in this manner also becomes easier as modules, plugins, roles, and docs are packaged and tagged with a collection version. Modules can be updated, renamed, improved upon; roles can be updated to reflect changes in module interaction; docs can be regenerated to reflect the edits and all are packaged and tagged together.
  
   Before collections, it was not uncommon for modules to break or lack timely updates needed to interact with the services they were interfacing with. This often required Ansible users or Ansible Tower administrators to run multiple versions of Ansible in virtual environments in order to consume a patch that addressed a module issue. Ansible Content Collections bring stability and predictability by breaking modules out from the core distribution.
   For automated organizations, this means that certified content is readily available to be applied to use-cases ripe for automation from day one.
  
        By default ansible collections live in:
             /etc/ansible/collections              
      
        Finding Collections Community:
             https://galaxy.ansible.com/
  
        Redhat Supported Content:
             https://cloud.redhat.com/ansible/automation-hub
  

Request a Ansible Tower License

Resources

• Ansible_Cheat_Sheets - Training vendors with nice wall cheat sheets for ansible visit their sites if you want more info

  • 1. Ansible-cheat-sheet-1
  • 2. Ansible_Cheat_Sheet-DevOps_Quickstart_Guide
  • 3. Ansible_Cheat_Sheet_Wall-Skills1 PNG
  • 4. Ansible-Cheat-Sheet_Wall-Skills2 PDF

• Ansible_DOC - Currently MT

• Ansible_PDF

  • 1. Ansible_Engine_and_Tower-Preferred_Practices
  • 2. Ansible_G2_Case_Study_Percussion
  • 3. Ansible From Stack Overflow
  • 4. Ansible_Tower-RBAC_Recommendations
  • 5. Ansible_Tower-Review_&_Customer_Use_Cases
  • 6. Ansible_Tower_Training
  • 7. Ansible_Tower-vs-awx
  • 8. Getting_Started_with_RH_Ansible_Tower

• Ansible_PPT

  • 1. Ansible_Automation_Platform
  • 2. Ansible_Importance_Deck
  • 3. Ansible_Tower
  • 4. Networking_Deck
  • 5. Ansible_Best_Practices
  • 6. Ansible_Technical
  • 7. Ansible_Windows_Automation
  • 8. Standard_Ansible_Tower
  • 9. Ansible_Deck
  • 10. Ansible_Tower_Automation
  • 11. MBU_Red_Hat_Ansible_Automation_Platform_Technical_Deck

• Ansible Use Cases - Downloads the xls spread sheet

• Ansible_Video_Demos

  • 1. Ansible_automation_analytics
  • 2. Ansible_multivendor_network_automation