#Centos 7 install virtualbox how to
#Centos 7 install virtualbox software

The alias is just a name to refer to that server. The group_name is an organizational tag that lets you refer to any servers listed under it with one word. The syntax we are going to use though looks something like this: The hosts file is fairly flexible and can be configured in a few different ways. Keep these examples in the file to help you learn Ansible’s configuration if you want to implement more complex scenarios in the future.

You will see a file that has a lot of example configurations commented out. Open the file with root privileges like this: We need to set up this file first before we can begin to communicate with our other computers. Step 2 - Configuring Ansible HostsĪnsible keeps track of all of the servers that it knows about through a “hosts” file.

#Centos 7 install virtualbox software

We now have all of the software required to administer our servers through Ansible. Once the repository is installed, install Ansible with yum: To get Ansible for CentOS 7, first ensure that the CentOS 7 EPEL repository is installed: To begin exploring Ansible as a means of managing our various servers, we need to install the Ansible software on at least one machine. Follow the steps in Initial Server Setup with CentOS 7 to create a non-root user, and make sure you can connect to the server without a password.

#Centos 7 install virtualbox how to

In this guide, you’ll install Ansible on a CentOS 7 server and learn some basics of how to use the software. Ansible can interact with clients through either command line tools or through its configuration scripts called Playbooks. Configuration files are mainly written in the YAML data serialization format due to its expressive nature and its similarity to popular markup languages. Modules can be written in any language and communicate in standard JSON. Any server that has an SSH port exposed can be brought under Ansible’s configuration umbrella, regardless of what stage it is at in its life cycle.Īnsible takes on a modular approach, making it easy to extend to use the functionalities of the main system to deal with specific scenarios. This is one way that Ansible simplifies the administration of servers. Because of this, an Ansible system does not require any additional software to be installed on the client computers. It communicates over normal SSH channels in order to retrieve information from remote machines, issue commands, and copy files. Ansible is a great alternative to these options because it has a much smaller overhead to get started.Īnsible works by configuring client machines from an computer with Ansible components installed and configured. While there are many popular configuration management systems available for Linux systems, such as Chef and Puppet, these are often more complex than many people want or need. They allow you to control many different systems in an automated way from one central location. Configuration management systems are designed to make controlling large numbers of servers easy for administrators and operations teams.