What is Ansible Tower ???
Ansible is a great automation tool for configuration management, allowing an automated means of implementing changes across a server environment. This includes the ability to automate both Windows and Linux server configurations. In general, you can run Ansible freely by downloading the module and running configurations and playbooks from the command line. However, this may not scale well in many environments, such as those with multiple admins, a GUI interface, REST API access, and centralized management.
Red Hat Ansible Tower is Red Hat’s commercial Ansible offering that fills the needs listed above; however, you may not be aware of the AWX Project from Red Hat. It provides an open-source version of Ansible Tower that may suit the needs of Tower functionality in many environments.
What is Ansible Tower?
Ansible Tower may be the more familiar option for Ansible users as it is the commercial GUI Ansible tool that provides the officially supported GUI interface, API access, role-based access, scheduling, notifications, and other nice features that allow businesses to manage environments easily with Ansible. Once an organization is operating Red Hat Ansible at a particular scale, it can become difficult to manage its Ansible automation environment when using the simple Ansible command-line tools.
Red Hat Ansible Tower is the solution to this problem as it provides the more ‘enterprise’ features to the solution by allowing a more scaled approach for multiple automation users/access and providing the integrations that most expect from an automation platform.
When looking at Scaling, Tower provides the following:
- Management of multiple environments spanning geographically diverse environments that are accessible by Tower users.
- You can create segmentation between users and resources for the purposes of security and role-based access control. This allows assigning permissions to users and only allowing them access to the resources they have permission to access through Ansible Tower.
- Centralization of resources through Tower allows enterprise teams to share resources, such as playbooks and workflows.
Ansible Tower is a commercial ‘pay for’ product that comes in two versions — Standard and Premium.
- Check out the pricing page at https://www.ansible.com/products/tower/pricing
If you want to test out Ansible Tower in a POC environment or simply use it in a small lab, Red Hat does offer a free10-node license that allows you to use full enterprise features for up to 10 nodes with Tower. You apply for this license when requesting the license key. It is noted as self-support (10 managed nodes) license.
Ansible Tower requirements
Supported Operating Systems:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 64-bit
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 64-bit
- Red Hat Enterprise Linus 8 64 bit
- CentOS 6 64-bit
- CentOS 7 64-bit
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit
- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit
Prerequisites:
- The latest stable release of Ansible
- 2 GB RAM minimum (4+ GB RAM recommended)
- 2 GB RAM (minimum and recommended for Vagrant trial installations)
- 4 GB RAM is recommended per 100 forks
- 20 GB hard disk
64-bit support required (kernel and runtime)
Ansible Tower feature list:
- A graphical user interface dashboard
- Role-based access control
- Job scheduling
- Graphical inventory management
- Multi-playbook workflow
- RESTful APIs
- External logging integrations
- Real-time job status updates
- Red Hat Technical Support team
- Red Hat Customer Portal access
