IBM Launches Ansible On Power Solution
February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie
IBM last week officially announced the Ansible Automation Platform is available for Power servers. The offering brings certified endpoint collection modules for IBM i, AIX, and Linux running on Power.
Ansible was originally developed to be a lightweight and reliable configuration management system for servers, applications, networks, containers, security, and the cloud. The software, which Red Hat acquired in 2015 (before Red Hat was subsequently snapped up by IBM), was designed to model customers’ IT infrastructure and manage it with an agentless approach.
The primary interface that administrators use to define actions with Ansible are playbooks based on YAML files. These playbooks, which Red Hat says are so simple that they “approach plain English,” define the configurations, deployment, and orchestration activities that Ansible will perform on the managed endpoints. Admins assign each endpoint with a specific role, which Ansible can call as tasks.
At execution time, Ansible connects to the managed endpoints and pushes out small programs, called Ansible modules, which are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system, Red Hat says. Ansible executes these modules (it uses SSH by default) and then removes them when finished.
Ansible has been supported on IBM i and AIX since July 2020, when IBM unveiled a slew of modules for those platforms. Called Ansible Content for IBM Power Systems, the offering included 20 different automations, with plans for more.
In March 2021, IBM and Red Hat rolled out another dozen or so Ansible modules for IBM i for specific tasks, such as checking whether a fix has downloaded or a PTF has installed, or configuring Db2 Mirror on a target node.
At that time, IBM also shipped nine “roles” that Ansible can use to automate IBM i activities, such as capturing a virtual server via PowerVC to generate a deployable image.
Ansible had already gained the attention of IBM i customers, said Steve Sibley, vice president and global offering management for IBM. “We are seeing very much the interest from clients,” he told IT Jungle.
In the months since, the Ansible drumbeat from IBM has only grown louder. Representatives from IBM have presented on Ansible at several conferences as Ansible appears to be one of the primary ways that IBM hopes to drive additional automation into the IBM i installed base.
The Ansible story figures to get better following last week’s IBM software announcement for Ansible Automation Platform for Power. While Ansible content was already available on IBM i and AIX, the product now has a new name, and, it would appear, new certifications for IBM Power environment to go along with certifications for x86 and IBM Z environments.
IBM views Ansible as a primary means for automating a variety of tasks on IBM i and AIX, including managing configurations, patches, security, and deployment for operating system and application code and updates. It also sees Ansible playing a role in “continuous delivery,” as well as providing a means for centralized backup and recovery and management and provisioning of virtualization environments.
For more information on how IBM and Red Hat are integrating Ansible and IBM i and AIX, see https://www.ansible.com/integrations/infrastructure/ibm-power-systems.
