New to Ansible - how to setup a practice environment

Hi all

I am new to Linux, Ansible and CI/Devops in general having come from a Windows/SQL background

I am trying to learn Ansible, My requirements are to control it from a CentOS machine and control other CentOS/Solaris machines and possibly Win2008R2 too

on my Windows desktop, I have created a CentOS VirtualBox and installed Ansible via yum. I have no other remote machines to use as yet

My question is simply - how do you practice? Am I best creating other VirtualBox machines on the same host and trying to control those, or am I best creating other VMs on my CentOS VM and controlling those? If the latter - then am I best using VirtualBox again or Vagrant (new to that too) to create the target VMs?

Or am I best doing something completely different?

Any advise welcome!

thanks
Paul

[...]

   My question is simply - how do you practice? Am I best creating other
   VirtualBox machines on the same host and trying to control those, or am I
   best creating other VMs on my CentOS VM and controlling those? If the
   latter - then am I best using VirtualBox again or Vagrant (new to that
   too) to create the target VMs?
   Or am I best doing something completely different?
   Any advise welcome!
   thanks
   Paul

Hi Paul,

my suggestion is that you practice in a test environment such as a
VirtualBox VM as you told. Otherwise, using Vagrant is a good choice
as well (see [1]).

You may have a look to Ansible Examples [0] and let the magic happens,
and then try to adapt those examples to your needs.

Internet is plenty of Ansible manuals, so you could start with a basic
"ansible -m ping localhost" style manual [1] and then become a ninja
like OpenShift guys [2].

Hope it helps!

[0] https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples
[1]
https://adamcod.es/2014/09/23/vagrant-ansible-quickstart-tutorial.html
[2] https://github.com/openshift/openshift-ansible