Ansible Modules for Dell Technologies PowerStore v1.6 & PowerMax 1.8

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy – and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

On this page, we’ll give you a really quick overview so you can see things in context. For more detail, hop over to docs.ansible.com.

The Ansible Modules for Dell Technologies (Dell) PowerStore allow Data Center and IT administrators to use RedHat Ansible to automate and orchestrate the configuration and management of Dell PowerStore arrays.

The capabilities of the Ansible modules are managing volumes, volume groups, hosts, host groups, snapshots, snapshot rules, replication rules, replication sessions, protection policies, file systems, NAS servers, SMB shares, user and tree quotas, file system snapshots, NFS exports, Clusters, Networks, Local users, Jobs, Roles, Certificates, Remote systems, security configuration, DNS server, Email notification destination, NTP server, Remote support configuration, Remote support contacts, SMTP configuration, LDAP accounts and LDAP domain configuration. It also allows gathering high level info from the array. The options available for each are list, show, create, modify and delete. These tasks can be executed by running simple playbooks written in yaml syntax. The modules are written so that all the operations are idempotent, so making multiple identical requests has the same effect as making a single request.

List of Ansible Modules for Dell PowerStore (as of the 1.6 modules release)

You can download the latest version, from below

https://github.com/dell/ansible-powerstore

Running Ansible Modules

The Ansible server must be configured with Python library for PowerStore to run the Ansible playbooks. The Documents provide information on different Ansible modules along with their functions and syntax. The parameters table in the Product Guide provides information on various parameters which needs to be configured before running the modules.

SSL Certificate Validation

Copy the CA certificate to this “/etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors” path of the host by any external means.
Set the “REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE” environment variable to the path of the SSL certificate using this command:
export REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE=/etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/<<Certificate_Name>>
Import the SSL certificate to host using this command:
update-ca-trust

Results

Each module returns the updated state and details of the entity. For example, if you are using the cluster module, all calls will return the updated details of the cluster. Sample result is shown in each module’s documentation.

You can see a demo, how it all looks, below