Ansible 2.9.7 on RHEL 7.9 - Upgrade plan

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1

Hi,

Ansible 2.9.7 is running on RHEL 7.9 server.
We are planning to upgrade the Ansible to latest version.

As per documentation, there are many Ansible versions released after 2.9.7 and latest one is Ansible 7 (ansible-core and ansible).

Can you advise which version would be the appropriate one to upgrade from 2.9.7 on the existing RHEL 7.9 server ? Does latest Ansible versions support RHEL 7.9 ?

Thanks,
Ram.

2

There is no upgrade path if you plan to continue using RHEL 7.9 as the controller.

Current supported versions are going to require a Python version (3.8 or 3.9+) newer than what is available on RHEL 7.9.

3

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the response and providing clarity. I understand the first step is to upgrade RHEL 7.9 to 8.x version to start considering Ansible upgrade.

If we upgrade the server to RHEL 8.4, Can you suggest which one would be the appropriate Ansible version to upgrade from 2.9.7 ?

And does this affects the existing playbooks developed in the current version ?

Thanks,
Ram.

4

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the response and providing clarity. I understand the first step is to upgrade RHEL 7.9 to 8.x version to start considering Ansible upgrade.

If we upgrade the server to RHEL 8.4, Can you suggest which one would be the appropriate Ansible version to upgrade from 2.9.7 ?

And does this affects the existing playbooks developed in the current version ?

Thanks,
Ram.

I publish RPM building tools for the leading edge ansible and
ansible-core at https://github.com/nkadel/ansiblerepo/ if you want,
until someone at Red Hat convinces their employees publishing ansible
to actually publish an RPM for RHEL. They do publish RPMs for
ansible-core.

That said, let's distinguish between "ansible", which was the old
name, and "ansible-core", which is the new name. The modern "ansible"
package does not contain ansible. It is of no use whatsoever for most
ansible administrators. It is a collection of more than 100
ansible_collections modules, and has a published *dependency* on
ansible-core, which actually contains the ansible software. The new
"ansible" is not your friend. If you need the up-to-date list of such
modules for reference or for local use, the list for the latest
ansible 7.0.0 release is published at:

    https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob/main/7/ansible-7.0.0.deps

There is no published RPM from Red Hat for the now misnamed "ansible"
package, only for "ansible-core". That much more useful package is
fairly up-to-date, ansible-core 2.13, from the "appstream" yum channel
for RHEL 8. ansible-core cannot be kept up-to-date on RHEL 7 unless
you're willing to install your own personal version of python 3.9 or
later. I'd definitely hop to RHEL 8 or RHEL 9 instead for my ansible
server.

And yes, the word "ansible" is now very confusing.

Nico Kadel-Garcia