Ansible Archives - IT Jungle

Shield Adds Task Automation To Message Monitoring Tool

March 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

Automating the monitoring of IBM i messages was just the start for Shield Advanced Solutions and its AAG offering. This month, the company announced that the Nagios-based tool has been bolstered with support for Ansible, which gives it the capability to automatically respond and take actions based on certain IBM i messages.

Shield Advanced Solutions launched AAG, which stands for At-A-Glance, back in 2023 as a way to help its customers monitor high availably setups. Shield President Chris Hird was aghast that some IBM i shops were leaving mirrored pairs under monitored, which reduced the odds the systems would be …
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What’s Up with Open Source on IBM i?

March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie

Open source software has become a steadfast component of the IBM i stack. But what open source software are IBM i shops using today? Results from Fortra’s recent IBM i Marketplace Survey provide answers.

It may seem odd now, but open source hasn’t always been a staple of the IBM i server’s software diet. Until PHP arrived on the platform two decades ago, proprietary software was the only option for IBM i shops.

But today, IBM i shops have hundreds of open source products to choose from. Thanks to the IBM i server’s openness, just about any product that can …
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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. …
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Ansible Automation Story Gets Better on IBM i

March 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

When IBM and Red Hat launched support for IBM i with its Ansible automation software in July 2020, it provided about three dozen Ansible modules that supported specific actions on IBM i. The companies recently added another dozen or so Ansible updates for IBM i, making the software even more useful on the midrange server.

Ansible is an open source configuration management package originally designed to enable remote administration of Linux servers. Over time, the software has been adopted to support a wide number of operating environments, including Kubernetes orchestration environments managing Docker containers in public and private clouds.

The …
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Cloud Walkers Updates IBM i Partition Manager, Slashes Prices

November 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

All over the world, a lot of things are taking a bit longer to get done these days thanks to the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But things are still getting done, and that is the main thing. So it is with Bartlomiej Grabowski, the founder and chief executive officer of Cloud Walkers, the startup based in Prague in the Czech Republic who released a tool called LPARKit, which we covered at its V1 release back in December 2019.

The plan, Grabowski tells The Four Hundred, was to take all of the input from the V1 users …
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IBM i Tries On a Red Hat

September 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

When IBM initiated its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, it was done to prepare Big Blue for the coming wave of innovation around things like containers, AI, clouds, and next-gen workloads. It was generally understood that most of the benefits would accrue in the X86 space. But apparently the plan called for sizable doses of IBM i, AIX, and mainframe, too.

Last week at COMMON’s virtual POWERUp conference, IBM’s Joe Cropper, who works in Power development and holds the title IBM Master Inventor, laid out how the Red Hat acquisition will benefit IBM i and …
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New IBM CEO’s First Hundred Days: A Mixed Bag

August 10, 2020 Alex Woodie

How did Arvind Krishna do during the first 100 days of his new job as the CEO of IBM? Krishna took the helm during a remarkable stretch in early April, when COVID-19 was clamping down on businesses of all sizes, so he will be forgiven for not completing the wholesale transformation of the 109-year-old company into the hybrid cloud leader during that time. Just the same, some people expected more from him.

The selection of Krishna by IBM’s board of directors is important because he was the architect of the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition, which was announced in October …
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Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Comes To IBM i

August 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

Big Blue is now supporting IBM i with Ansible, the open source configuration management software developed by Red Hat. By including IBM i and AIX as a supported target in Ansible, companies that run IBM i will be able to remotely configure and manage IBM i and AIX servers using the same Ansible tools and techniques that they use to manage mainstream X86 and cloud server environments.

Ansible was created back in 2012 by Michael DeHaan, the author of the Cobbler provisioning server and co-author of the Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) framework for remote administration. It’s been widely adopted …
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