Ansible capable of handling diskless clients?

Hi all,

a similar question was already posted on Serverfault
(http://serverfault.com/questions/693698/config-management-for-nfs-root-cluster) but got turned down as being off-topic.

To summarize:

Is Ansible capable of handling diskless clients that only have read-only storage mounted (besides a TMPFS mount)?

I don't see a reason it would not.

First ansible normally is run in push mode so not much for it to
manage 'locally'.

Managing services would be the same as with full clients, the issue
here is handling the per server specific configs and general configs.

Most of this can be done with ansible looking at only the 'master' and
treating slave configs as a special path. Another option is to have
ansible know about the slaves and delegate changes for the slaves to
the master + additional pathing to the correct slave configs.

Brian,

thanks for your answer.

As I'm not yet familiar with Ansible, do you have any pointers to documentation where I can find what you described (esp. the last
point about additional pathing)?

not really, most configs are handled with the copy or template module,
in the case that you delegate the config to master for 'existing
hosts' you can do something like this for pathing:

- template: src=httpd.conf.j2
dest=/slaves/{{inventory_hostname}}/etc/httpd/httpd.conf
  delegate_to: master

inventory_hostname is a variable that contains 'current host'