Is it possible to run ansible on a bare metal

ansiblebare-metal

Is it possible to run Ansible on a bare metal to install OS on multiple machines along with SW installation and CODE deployment?

Best Answer

Bare metal is possible, as a part of provisioning use cases. Ansible can run on many platforms and talk to many operating systems and orchestrator APIs. Examples:

  • Network playbooks to configure the desired IP networks.
  • Install and configure a network boot system to provision hosts.
  • Launch bare metal instances from your favorite IaaS provider.
  • Manage hypervisor clusters.
  • Run Ansible from each host as a part of a first boot configuration, perhaps with the ansible-pull wrapper script.
  • OS and application configuration playbooks.

You will need a Python interpreter to run Ansible, some credentials to systems, and some procedure that can be automated for it to do. Typically some management system is a prerequisite to get started, even if just a laptop to run Ansible from.

The amount of effort varies depending on what you are trying to do. Bare metal AWS EC2 instances can be spun up similar to virtual ones. A rack of hardware without a nice API may be quite a long playbook.

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