Red Hat Consulting: Ansible Tower and Satellite 6 Integration

29 maggio 2018Nick Poyant

As your environment continues to grow, so does the need to manage and automate it to a higher standard of quality. Using Red Hat Satellite, you can easily keep your infrastructure running efficiently and securely with its content management and provisioning capabilities. While most folks using Linux have Satellite, Ansible Tower provides a not-so-secret weapon to supercharge your Red Hat deployment through automation and configuration management.

In this short video, we discuss how integrating Ansible Tower and Satellite 6, can improve your experience and take your business to the next level.

When using Satellite 6 as an inventory source for Tower:

Establish users and connect them to host groups and/or a specific application
Mirror configuration from Satellite to Tower
- Establish a set of credentials that give communication between the two products
- Create inventories that match the host group structure
- Associate Tower accounts for the users, giving them the ability to access inventories and connect all the way through the workflow

The bigger the environment, the more cumbersome the set of local user accounts. You can streamline the management process of these by using an IDM solution between the two tools to mirror the users connection across both machines.

Once the connection is established, you can then sync your inventory bringing over all the additional information to parameterize Ansible playbooks.

When using Tower infrastructure to enhance Satellite provisioning:

Take a look at the pre-existing job templates in Tower
Configure provisioning callback and associated host configuration key
- Take host configuration info and plug it into provisioning templates

Using the inventory as the integration point where Satellite is feeds host information back to Ansible, the communication validates that a new machine is in the inventory and kicks off an Ansible playbook for automation at the click of a button!

This is not Red Hat’s first rodeo. Talk to your account executive about a Red Hat Discovery Session to find out more about integrating Satellite and Ansible, or reach out directly to redhat.com/consulting with questions. Red Hat Consulting is here to help.

And be sure to catch another segment of the Red Hat Consulting Whiteboard Video series, available at: red.ht/RHCVideos.