A comprehensive Ansible role to model and deploy Cisco ACI fabrics.
This role provides an abstraction layer that is convenient to use. By providing your required configuration (a structured dataset) in your inventory this role will perform the needed actions to ensure that configuration is deployd on your ACI infrastructure.
Using this role you can easily set up demo environment, maintain a lab or use it as the basis for your in-house ACI infrastructure. It can help you understand how ACI works while prototyping and testing. No prior Ansible or ACI knowledge is required to get started.
This role requires the aci_rest module and the standard set of ACI modules from Ansible v2.4.
There are two ways you can test this role:
- Installing it by cloning the Github repository
git clone https://github.com/datacenter/ansible-role-aci-model datacenter.aci-model
- Install it using the ansible-galaxy command
ansible-galaxy install datacenter.aci-model
In order to work with the provided ACI topology, a custom Jinja2 filter (aci_listify) is needed. You need to configure your Ansible to find this Jinja2 filter. There are two ways to do this:
Configure Ansible so it looks for the custom aci filter plugin:
filter_plugin = /home/ansible/datacenter.aci-model/plugins/filter
Copy the filter plugin (plugins/filter/aci.py) into your designated filter plugin directory
Because of its general usefulness, we are looking into making this aci_listify filter more generic and make it part of the default Ansible filters.
Look inside the example inventory and provide the needed information. Only the first APIC is being use by the playbook, so you don't need more than one.
The role accepts various variables, including:
- apic_host
- apic_username (defaults to 'admin')
- apic_password
- apic_use_proxy (defaults to false)
- apic_validate_certs (defaults to true)
You can configure these as part of your host variables, or group variables.
If you cloned it from Github, ensure you cloned it to a directory named datacenter.aci-model. Otherwise the playbook will not find the role with name "datacenter.aci-model".
If you installed the role from Galaxy, you should be fine to use the examples from Github.
Run the following command using Ansible v2.4:
ansible-playbook -i inventory.yml playbook.yml -v
The first time it will deploy that configuration on your ACI infrastructure.
You can make modifications and run it again as often as you like to modify the existing configuration.