Driving PowerOne API with Ansible

By Al
The Ansible community is massive, so it is no surprise that version 2.9 came out with more than 3600 modules. This number keeps growing and it is motivating a change in how modules are distributed in the future. To read more about these changes you can read from Jeff Geerling himself

However sometimes still you will come across with either:

  • some functionality that hasn't been implemented on a module
  • or a target for which there are no modules
What do you do then? You have a few options:
  • create your own module. This can be done in Python and even if you are not a Python guru you can find many tutorials that don't look intimidating at all
  • you use the "shell" or "command" modules to run some other script
  • if your target can be managed through a REST API then you can use the "uri" module

REST API's are the basis for many automation tasks nowadays. An advantage of building automation through the API is that the workflow you build is portable to other tools (of the configuration management kind or otherwise)

This is the method I will be discussing briefly today to manage a DellEMC PowerOne. This is a converged system from DellEMC that has been designed with the concept of "autonomy" in mind. The idea is that from the controller down everything, including hypervisor, compute, network, fabric and storage, is automated and not exposed to the user, which is no different to what happens in a public cloud to be honest. What the system exposes is the upstream connectivity and it does so through a very simple high-level REST API. Here you can see the API calls for the CRG (read ESX cluster) resource in the API

In this video I use Ansible with the "uri" module interacting with the PowerOne simulator to:
  • show the list of clusters configured in the system 
  • create a new cluster (CRG) using a POST call and a "json" body
  • show the list of clusters again to verify it got created

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sending PowerStore alerts via SNMP

By Al
Image
In this previous article we discussed how to leverage PowerStore's powerful API to collect audit logs and send them to a Syslog server . We used Logstash to do that because of its extensive list of plugins Sometimes I come across organizations that still have a requirement to send storage array Alerts to SNMP. As in the Syslog case, ultimately most modern monitoring tools today support collecting information via REST API because that's the way the application world is going, i.e. the cloud native way ... it would be fun to see Prometheus monitoring Kubernetes via SNMP :) However there is still some requirement out there for SNMP traps, so we will explore how to do it. For simplicity we will use the same toolset that we used in the previous article. I encourage you to revisit quickly the article as we did an extensive introduction to Logstash, with practical examples as well as a description of the logs available in PowerStore. I won't cover those aspects in this article I
Read more

Electronic Nose - eNose

By Al
Image
In the previous article I provided details on VeeFarm which was one of the best projects we saw in ANZ Pied Piper 2019 edition and one of the best projects in the history of the program. The program inspired me and others to work together to showcase a great idea and the Pied Piper program itself during our presales conference. An idea I suggested to enhance VeeFarm was an electronic nose that could be used to detect the optimal ripening of the produce to advise the owner that it is the right time to pick it up the produce. This is an idea I had in the backburner for a while but never found the time to work on. Vee gave me the perfect excuse. The electronic nose, or eNose for short, is a custom PCB that hosts a range of gas sensors. For the proof of concept, I used the cheap MQ sensors. These are designed mostly for hobbyists and makers and they barely cost $1 per sensor. As one could expect, tweaking and calibrating these sensors it is even harder than the most expensive counter
Read more

Use Vagrant to deploy to AWS

By Al
Image
In the Pied Piper program we run through a Vagrant tutorial as we found it a great tool to help set up other labs. We are not going to cover Vagrant in detail in this blog as there are plenty of good examples out there. If you are interested in the exercises we did you can visit the repository: https://github.com/cermegno/vagrant-lesson However, something I felt is not sufficiently document and would make a good candidate for a post is how to use Vagrant to deploy to AWS and particularly from Windows. I found a couple of posts that provided good detail but none of them prevented me from running into Windows specific issues. If you are running it from Linux, this article will still help you as I will point out the differences anyway. Install prerequisites Firstly, as the Vagrant documentation states, "providers" other than VirtualBox require a plug in. This is how you install the AWS provider: vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws Deploying to AWS EC2 generally mea
Read more