There are many blogs which cover what is Ansible and why we should care. But this multi-part blog series will cover how DellEMC and Ansible can help you automate many storage tasks.

Ansible is being used in many organizations nowadays to manage a vast range of infrastructure, ranging from traditional configuration management to cloud resources in public clouds to physical infrastructure such as network and storage devices. There are multiple reasons why you might want to use Ansible, including – but not limited to – below examples.

• You’re trying to have efficient DevOps environment
• Automate Day 1/2 tasks
• Need centralized configuration management

Getting Started with Ansible

Even if you’ve not installed Ansible before, it’s very easy to get started. There are many different ways to install Ansible and many dependencies will be needed based on your environment and systems you’ll be managing.

Once your Linux machine is up and running (CentOS in my case) you can follow next steps

Apart from Ansible itself there will be many dependencies which needs to be installed. In the case of DellEMC PowerMax storage we will need

• Unisphere for PowerMax 9.0 to manage Dell EMC PowerMax arrays
• Ansible 2.6 or higher
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5. (I have used CentOS)
• Python 2.7.12 or higher
• Python library for Unisphere (PyU4V) 3.0.0.14

Note that Ansible relies on Python and the Ansible for PowerMax modules relies on a the PyU4V Python library

So let’s get started

Check the installed Python version by running below command and make sure it’s supported version

# python -V

For installing PIP package on CentOS you will need to install EPEL repository, which can be done by running below command

# sudo yum install epel-release -y

Once EPEL is installed you can run below command to install PIP. Also check version once installed

# sudo yum install python-pip -y
# pip -V

As mentioned earlier DellEMC PowerMax Ansible integration relies on a the PyU4V Python library Run below command to install PyU4V

# pip install PyU4V

Finally run below command to install Ansible

# sudo yum install ansible

At this point you have successfully installed Ansible and ready for next parts.

• Part 1 – Installing Ansible
• Part 2 – Understanding Ansible
• Part 3 – Installing DellEMC PowerMax Ansible Module
• Part 4 – DellEMC PowerMax Ansible Modules