F5 Ansible 101 F5 Workshop

Welcome to this Ansible 101 training.

This training will take you through the basic knowledge and exercises to gain understanding how F5 BIG-IP can leverage Ansible to facilitate automated application services.

Being a ‘101’, this training will only cover:

  • Exploring some Ansible basics.
  • Gathering BIG-IP facts.
  • Creating BIG-IP objects like nodes, pool, virtual server and iRules.
  • Disable pool member, delete configuration and error handling.
  • Introduction of using AS3 with Ansible.

After taking this course a student should be able to create simple playbooks for deploying application services on BIG-IP and be able to use AS3 with Ansible and push configurations through a playbook on the BIG-IP.

Note

If you have any questions or issues Click here to open a request.

Pre-requisites

To get the most out of this training, the student should already have some basic knowledge about the use of Ansible and BIG-IP. When you are completely new to Ansible it is recommended to start with the 2 hour Ansible Quick Start training from Linux Academy.

Lab Environment

This Ansible 101 training comes with a pre-configured lab environment. Please go here to provision your lab environment. This content is a multi-purpose toolkit for effectively demonstrating Ansible’s capabilities on F5 BIG-IP by providing workshop training in various forms – instructor-led, hands-on or self-paced.

Login information for the BIG-IP:

  • username: admin
  • password: provided by instructor OR choosen while deploying the infrastructure using the provisioner (default is ansible)

Following topics will be covered:

Section 1 - Ansible F5 Basic Exercises

  • Exercise 1.0 - Exploring the lab environment
  • Exercise 1.1 - Using Ansible to gather data from F5 BIG-IP
  • Exercise 1.2 - Adding nodes to F5 BIG-IP
  • Exercise 1.3 - Adding a load balancing pool
  • Exercise 1.4 - Adding members to a pool
  • Exercise 1.5 - Adding a virtual server
  • Exercise 1.6 - Adding and attaching an iRule to a virtual server
  • Exercise 1.7 - Save the running configuration
  • Exercise 1.8 - Virtual server facts

Section 2 - Ansible F5 Operational/Advanced Exercises

  • Exercise 2.0 - Disabling a pool member
  • Exercise 2.1 - Deleting F5 BIG-IP Configuration
  • Exercise 2.2 - Error Handling

Section 3 - Ansible F5 AS3 Exercises

  • Exercise 3.0 - Intro to AS3
  • Exercise 3.1 - Operational Change with AS3
  • Exercise 3.2 - Deleting a Web Application
  • Exercise 3.3 - Deploying WAF through AS3