Unleashing Full Potential of Ansible Framework: University Labs Administration

Abstract

The proliferation of virtualization coupled with the increasing power of industry-standard servers and the availability of cloud computing has led to a significant increase in the number of servers and end stations that need to be managed with or without an organization. At this point, data center orchestration and configuration management tools come into playas in many cases. System administrators manage groups of identical servers or end stations (physical hosts or virtual machines) which run identical applications and services. They are deployed on virtualization frameworks within the organization, or running as cloud or hosted instances in data centers. In this paper, we consider building up new layer for the utilized Ansible orchestration tool. In the realized scenario, more than 10 laboratories at Brno University of Technology were utilized to test our developed framework in case of remote management. To bring the introduced functionality closer to system administrators, an universal web application enabling them to do the configuration changes via the smart devices (e.g., smart phones and tablets) was created and thoroughly tested.

Keywords

• Infrastructure as Code
• Internet of Things
• Orchestration tools
• Remote Management