Avi – Using Ansible to deploy an application

In this blog I’ll walk through what is required to deploy an application in Avi, using ansible.
Ansible is pretty flexible, and a great tool to start automating your network stack.

There are a number of ways to use ansible to create an application in Avi:

• Deploy an Avi application using vmware.alb collection and tasks
  • Simplest, but not as neat as the below.
• Deploy an Avi application using vmware.alb collection and roles with tasks
  • Similar to the above, but a little neater. This is the example shown in this blog post
• Deploy an Avi application using vmware.alb collection and the aviconfig role
  • More like a declarative model. You specify a few variables about the application and let the aviconfig role do the rest. Very simple, but not as flexible.
• Deploy an Avi application using vmware.alb collection and the avi api_session
  • This is basically a REST api call, except that api_session handles the Avi session for you
• Deploy an Avi application using vmware builtin rest module, ansible.builtin.uri.
  • This is the most complex solution and uses the least amount of automation since you will be doing rest calls against the Avi controller for each object created, as well as handling your own session cookies and headers.

Software Versions used in this demo

Deploy an Avi controller and SEs

If you don’t already have some type of Avi controller in your environment, you’ll need to do this as a first step. The script below is designed for an Avi controller running in vCenter. So if you have a public cloud environment, the script will need to be modified slightly.
See my blog post on deploying an Avi controller

Prepping a bootstrap VM for Ansible

You need some type of server/host to run ansible playbooks. This can be an ubuntu or centos VM, it could even be your PC or MAC if you find a way to install ansible from there. In my case I’ve deployed a VM in vcenter, and installed Ubuntu 22.

Update Ubuntu

sudo su
apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
reboot # I like to reboot after a large upgrade like this

Install Ansible and the vmware.alb collection

sudo su
apt install ansible
ansible-galaxy collection install vmware.alb

Install Git

sudo su
apt install git

Clone the ansible repo

mkdir /home/ubuntu/ansible
cd /home/ubuntu/ansible
git clone https://github.com/canad1an/avi_ansible_examples.git
cd avi_ansible_examples/avi_create_app/

Configuring the ansible playbook

Now that we’ve setup the ubuntu bootstrap VM, let’s configure some variables in the ansible playbook and we can run the playbook.

The only configuration file in this playbook is /vars/creds.yaml
The Applications list is a list of all the applications you would like to create in Avi, it can be 1 or many. And the avi_controller_info has details on where to deploy the applications.

applications: # A list of the applications to deploy
  - app_name: app-1 # Name of the application
    app_port: 80 # VirtualService Port
    app_http_profile: "System-HTTP"
    app_network_profile: "System-TCP-Proxy"
    app_health_monitor: "System-TCP"
    app_pool_members: # List of pool members, can be 1 or many
      - ip_address: "10.10.10.10"
        port: 80
        enabled: true #Enable or disable the pool member by default
      - ip_address: "10.10.10.11"
        port: 80
        enabled: true
    state: present
  - app_name: app-2
    app_port: 80
    app_http_profile: "System-HTTP"
    app_network_profile: "System-TCP-Proxy"
    app_health_monitor: "System-TCP"
    app_pool_members:
      - ip_address: "10.10.10.10"
        port: 80
        enabled: true
      - ip_address: "10.10.10.11"
        port: 80
        enabled: true
    state: present
avi_controller_info:
  avi_credentials:
    controller: "10.225.6.35" # Avi controller IP or fqdn
    username: "admin"
    password: "password123"
    api_version: "22.1.3"
  avi_cloud: "vcenter-cloud" # Avi cloud to deploy the VS
  tenant: "admin"
  network: "vip-traffic" # Network for the VIPs

Run the ansible playbook and create the applications

After you’ve edited the above config file, now we can run the ansible script.

cd avi_ansible_examples/avi_create_app #Navigate back to this directory, since this is where the main.yaml file exists
export ANSIBLE_HOST_KEY_CHECKING=False; ansible-playbook main.yaml

As you can see the 2 applications have been created in Avi, VirtualService, vsvip, and pool. They’re marked red since the pool members are failing health check.

Feel free to customize this script as needed, for your use case.