A sample Ansible project to model and deploy payload on top of Cisco ACI fabrics.
This project provides an abstraction layer that is convenient to use. By providing your required configuration (a structured dataset) in your inventory this project will perform the needed actions to ensure that configuration is deployed on your ACI infrastructure.
Using this project 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 cisco.aci collection and the standard setup of Ansible.
You can install the working environment either by using the system-wide package manager or by using the Python virtual environment.
Example commands to install Ansible and required dependencies packages for RHEL9 or its derivatives:
sudo dnf install -y ansible
sudo dnf install -y python3-lxml python3-cryptography python3-pyOpenSSL python3-dateutil
Example commands to create a Python virtual environment and install Ansible and required dependencies:
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -U pip
pip install ansible
pip install -r requirements.txt
You can install this project by cloning the GitHub repository:
git clone https://github.com/joninsk/ansible-aci-model ansible-aci-model
You can install the cisco.aci collection directly by using the following command:
ansible-galaxy collection install cisco.aci
or from requirements file:
ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml
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:
```ini
filter_plugin = /home/user/ansible-aci-model/plugins/filter
```
Or 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.
If you installed the collection from Galaxy, you should be fine to use the examples from GitHub:
ansible-galaxy collection list cisco.aci
# /usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ansible_collections
Collection Version
---------- -------
cisco.aci 2.1.0
# /home/user/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections
Collection Version
---------- -------
cisco.aci 2.3.0
Look inside the example inventory hosts and provide the needed information. Only the first APIC is being use by the playbook, so you don't need more than one.
Access credentials have to be defined in the inventory:
-
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.
Run the following command using installed Ansible:
ansible-playbook main.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.
An example of a topology defined in aci.yml you can use with this model.
- name: Deploy topology using ACI model
hosts: '*apic1'
gather_facts: no
tasks:
- include_tasks: tasks/main.yml- This is a derivative of datacenter/ansible-role-aci-model role for demonstration of Ansible capabilities to configure the APIC fabrics.
- The Cisco Sandbox APIC is an online testing environment hosted by Cisco.
- Feel free to modify, extend and add additional functionality and share it on GitHub!
GPLv3