Ansible Installation on Red hat Linux 7 & connect to windows hosts

 Installing Ansible on Red hat Linux 7:

• Ansible architecture contains master and slaves, Master controls all the saves and the communication is established using SSH protocol.
• Ansible software is installed in master machine, and no need to install any client soft wares on slaves.
• Ansible master should be Linux Distribution, currently windows doesn't support as master node however windows server machines can be used as slaves.
• If the slave machine is Linux Distribution then only pre-requisite is python should be installed and similarly winrm service should be enabled for windows slave machine. 

Ansible Master Setup on RedHat Linux 7 :

  Ansible is not part of RHEL default repository that ships with RedHat Enterprise Linux Subscription

We need to install EPEL(Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository which is maintained by fedora for installing Ansible.

Step 1:Install the EPEL repository configuration package using the following command.

$yum install -y https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

This will do all configuration, i.e adds epel.repo to etc/yum.repos.d/ and enables it.

You can verify the same using $yum repolist

Step 2:Install Ansible from EPEL repository normally

$yum install -y ansible  

Check Ansible version using $ansible --version

Step 3:Install Pywinrm if you have any windows slaves in your setup.(Optional)

$pip install pywinrm

This package is required to establish connections with windows machines as it uses winrm.

Ansible Slave Setup on RedHat Linux 7:

You don't need to install any additional softwares just cross check python is installed or not, as it ships by default with all  linux distributions.

Ansible Slave Setup on Windows Server 2012/2012 R2/2006/2019/10:

Prerequisites for Ansible slave:

Ensure your system is running .NET Framework 4.0 and later.

Windows PowerShell should be Version 3.0 & later

But don't worry as all above mentioned servers will have all of these.

Step 1:You need to execute below 4 powershell commands for configuration.

1.$url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/devel/examples/scripts/ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1" 

2.$file = "$env:temp\ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1"

3.(New-Object -TypeName System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile($url, $file)

4.powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File $file

Expected Ouput:

Self-signed SSL certificate generated; thumbprint: 5FAF0EAEF69EBB15A6B7CB9C80C29884D2F381C1


wxf                 : http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/09/transfer
a                   : http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing
w                   : http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wsman/1/wsman.xsd
lang                : en-US
Address             : http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing/role/anonymous
ReferenceParameters : ReferenceParameters

Ok.

                                                             or 

Download the powershell script from here and execute it.

Step 2:Run the following command to get the WinRM configuration(Optional)

PS C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop> winrm get winrm/config
Config
    MaxEnvelopeSizekb = 500
    MaxTimeoutms = 60000
    MaxBatchItems = 32000
    MaxProviderRequests = 4294967295
    Client
        NetworkDelayms = 5000
        URLPrefix = wsman
        AllowUnencrypted = false
        Auth
            Basic = true
            Digest = true
            Kerberos = true
            Negotiate = true
            Certificate = true
            CredSSP = false
        DefaultPorts
            HTTP = 5985
            HTTPS = 5986
        TrustedHosts
    Service
        RootSDDL = O:NSG:BAD:P(A;;GA;;;BA)(A;;GR;;;IU)S:P(AU;FA;GA;;;WD)(AU;SA;GXGW;;;WD)
        MaxConcurrentOperations = 4294967295
        MaxConcurrentOperationsPerUser = 1500
        EnumerationTimeoutms = 240000
        MaxConnections = 300
        MaxPacketRetrievalTimeSeconds = 120
        AllowUnencrypted = true
        Auth
            Basic = true
            Kerberos = true
            Negotiate = true
            Certificate = false
            CredSSP = false
            CbtHardeningLevel = Relaxed
        DefaultPorts
            HTTP = 5985
            HTTPS = 5986
        IPv4Filter = *
        IPv6Filter = *
        EnableCompatibilityHttpListener = false
        EnableCompatibilityHttpsListener = false
        CertificateThumbprint
        AllowRemoteAccess = true
    Winrs
        AllowRemoteShellAccess = true
        IdleTimeout = 7200000
        MaxConcurrentUsers = 10
        MaxShellRunTime = 2147483647
        MaxProcessesPerShell = 25
        MaxMemoryPerShellMB = 1024
        MaxShellsPerUser = 30

PS C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop> 

Step 3:Edit the /etc/ansible/host file(Inventory file)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[wintel]

192.168.2.16

[wintel:vars]

ansible_user=administrator

ansible_password=Password@123

ansible_connection=winrm

ansible_winrm_server_cert_validation=ignore 

  

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Step 4:Set the basic authentication to true

Set-Item -Path WSMan:\localhost\Service\Auth\Basic -Value $true winrm set winrm/config/service '@{AllowUnencrypted="true"}'

Step 5:Ping from Ansible master to Windows slave

$ansible wintel -m win_ping

Similarly ping to linux slave

$ansible winhost -m ping

Expected Result:

192.168.2.16 | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false,
    "ping": "pong"
}

References:

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