So in this demo,
we're going to address preparing the environment for
an Ansible Tower installation.
We will also discuss the license requirements and go through my lab environment.
You will also get a glimpse of the dashboard and the
initial steps needed to run Ansible Tower,
such as setting up the passwords that Ansible Tower uses.
So to use Ansible Tower, you need to install it.
And to do so,
you go to the Red Hat website and do a search for Red
Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
You can have a 60‑day subscription of Red Hat Ansible Automation
for installation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
As an alternative to using Tower, you can use AWX,
which is fully open source and does not require any license.
So in this demo,
I'm going to be using a free evaluation license available from Red Hat.
Then you simply just download the tarball,
and the setup script requires you to point to your evaluation license.
So I've set up my Ansible Tower machines on AWS.
On AWS, I chose t2.large instance as the underlying host.
The base image that I'll be using will be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8,
and for the security group configuration,
I've simply allowed HTTP and HTTPS from the outside to my EC2 instance.
So let's go to the public IP address of my instance,
and here I can open the UI from selecting the open address.
This allows me to open the UI from my laptop.
Now let us go back to the directory where I have my installation,
and I just want to have a quick look at my inventory file.
So the very first thing you need to do is go into your
inventory file and make some changes.
And here we need to set the password that Ansible Tower uses.
So you really need to do this before you run the
setup script that I've just run.
So you could say that changing the passwords in the
inventory file is the very first step.
Here, we're looking for every parameter that has a text of password.
For demo purposes, I'm just using a simple password; however,
in production, you want to use something stronger.
So we have an admin_password to change, a pg_password,
and an automationhub_admin_password.
So once these passwords have changed, you can start the installation.
So to speed things up, I have done this for you,
and I've also ran the installation in the background.
So once Ansible Tower is up and running,
we can go into the browser and have a look at the managed
assets that Ansible Tower is managing.
It is from here we can carry out all the admin tasks,
unlike with the CLI utility that we use with Ansible Core.
As you can see,
the dashboard gives you an overview of everything that is happening
inside of your Tower environment and your system.
So we simply log in with the admin username and the password of the
password that we just set in the inventory file.
As you can see in this dashboard, we have a fresh install,
so my environment is really small.
I've got one host, which is the Tower host.
I have one inventory that we just looked at,
and I have one project, which is the default project.
These are the demo objects that are here for default when you
install Tower by running the setup script.
So in the dashboard,
the hosts are the number of hosts you have in your environment.
Failed hosts are when you run playbooks weren't able
to run all tasks successfully.
We have the inventory, which is our managed hosts.
Inventory sync failures increments when it looks to update a dynamic inventory,
let's say to Azure or Google Cloud, but it has failed.
Similar to project sync failures,
here we have projects defined as failed when it
tries to sync from a remote source.
So the immediate view we get from the Tower dashboard gives you,
let's say, a holistic overview of the main Ansible Tower components.
So let us have a look at some settings,
and this is where we have license information.
So here we go down to the bottom, and we click on Settings in the bottom left,
and then we select license information.
This will display the license information that I have for my Tower environment.
Here you can see I've got a 60‑day product trial and
that my subscription is compliant.
So before you do anything, you need to get a license,
and I've done this for us in the background.
It's really easy, and we have a couple of options here.
You can, for example, request a license,
browse for a license on your local machine,
or put in your Red Hat credentials.
That already has a trial license attached to.
So I already have a 60‑day trial license attached to my user ID of mconran111.
So here I simply clicked on GET SUBSCRIPTIONS,
and this attached the license to my ID to my installation of Tower.
As you can see, the total hosts I have is 100,
which is more than enough for a training course,
and it's good even for proof of concept deployments,
so I'm pretty sure you won't hit any scalability
requirements with your trial license.
As this is a fresh install and I have not set up any managed hosts yet,
I've got 99 available.
One of the hosts taken is the localhost, which is Ansible Tower.
Keep in mind though, if you somehow go beyond this number,
it won't work anymore.