Ansible Forklift: Lift and Shift Production Into Testbed

Use NetApp, VMware, and Ansible to forklift a production virtual machine environment into a test environment. Used at Hughes Network Systems, and demoed at NetApp Insight 2019.

Demo

TODO

(11-1-2019) I will be adding the following in the coming week:

• a list and description of all custom modules
• updated documentation for custom module
• diagram/overview of setup
• (maybe) workflow diagram of the automation

Using Forklift

Application Requirements

• NetApp ONTAP
• Ansible - 2.8+
• vCenter - 6.5+

Environment Requirements

• NetApp
  • Established SnapMirror for all datastore volumes in your inventory
  • All volumes only contain one lun, named lun1
• vCenter/VMware
  • Folder structure for VM's, datastores, and networks
  • Pre-created vmware networks that represent their production counterparts. Should be done for each UAT.
• Networking
  • The assumption is that each testbed contins networks that overlap with their production counterpart. Therefore you must make sure that each UAT is isolated.
• Bastion node
  • Linux server acting as an ssh proxy to each testbed you create.

Quickstart

1. Customize the inventory/hosts.yml inventory file, which will use your NetApp volume names as inventory hosts.
2. Export VMware environment variables to be consumed by the VMware modules.

export VMWARE_HOST=vcenter.example.com
export VMWARE_USER=jdoe
export VMWARE_PASSWORD=supersecret
export VMWARE_PORT=443
export VMWARE_VALIDATE_CERTS=false

3. VMWare inventory scripts (as well as Ansible Tower/AWX vCenter credential) use slightly diffirent environment variables. I'm guessing there was a lack of communication. You can just paste the below to re-use the env vars from step 2:

export VMWARE_SERVER=$VMWARE_HOST
export VMWARE_USERNAME=$VMWARE_USER

4. Export the vmfolder_groups environment variable used by the vmware_folder_inventory.py inventory script. Documentation can be found in the dynamic inventory script. Also supports vaulted variables.

export vmfolder_groups='{"datacenter1":{"/path/to/folder1":{"var1":"foo","var2":"bar"},"/path/to/folder2":{"var1":"baz"}}}'

5. Run either the SAN or NAS "all in one" playbook, replacing UAT1 in the example below with your UAT instance (e.g. UAT1, UAT2, etc.)

ansible-playbook playbooks/san_all_in_one.yml -e uat_instance=UAT1

6. To tear down a UAT, run one of the teardown playbooks, again specifying your UAT in a uat_instance extra variable:

ansible-playbook playbooks/san_teardown.yml -e uat_instance=UAT1