Chapter 1. Getting started with RHEL System Roles

This section explains what RHEL System Roles are. Additionally, it describes how to apply a particular role through an Ansible playbook to perform various system administration tasks.

1.1. Introduction to RHEL System Roles

RHEL System Roles is a collection of Ansible roles and modules. RHEL System Roles provide a configuration interface to remotely manage multiple RHEL systems. The interface enables managing system configurations across multiple versions of RHEL, as well as adopting new major releases.

On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, the interface currently consists of the following roles:

  • kdump
  • network
  • selinux
  • storage
  • certificate
  • kernel_settings
  • logging
  • metrics
  • nbde_client and nbde_server
  • timesync
  • tlog

All these roles are provided by the rhel-system-roles package available in the AppStream repository.

Additional resources

1.2. RHEL System Roles terminology

You can find the following terms across this documentation:

System Roles terminology

Ansible playbook
Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process.
Control node
Any machine with Ansible installed. You can run commands and playbooks, invoking /usr/bin/ansible or /usr/bin/ansible-playbook, from any control node. You can use any computer that has Python installed on it as a control node - laptops, shared desktops, and servers can all run Ansible. However, you cannot use a Windows machine as a control node. You can have multiple control nodes.
Inventory
A list of managed nodes. An inventory file is also sometimes called a “hostfile”. Your inventory can specify information like IP address for each managed node. An inventory can also organize managed nodes, creating and nesting groups for easier scaling. To learn more about inventory, see the Working with Inventory section.
Managed nodes
The network devices, servers, or both that you manage with Ansible. Managed nodes are also sometimes called “hosts”. Ansible is not installed on managed nodes.

1.3. Applying a role

The following procedure describes how to apply a particular role.

Prerequisites

  • Ensure that the rhel-system-roles package is installed on the system that you want to use as a control node: 

    # yum install rhel-system-roles

  • You need the ansible package to run playbooks that use RHEL System Roles. Ensure that the Ansible Engine repository is enabled, and the ansible package is installed on the system that you want to use as a control node.

    • If you do not have a Red Hat Ansible Engine Subscription, you can use a limited supported version of Red Hat Ansible Engine provided with your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. In this case, follow these steps:

      1. Enable the RHEL Ansible Engine repository: 

        # subscription-manager refresh
# subscription-manager repos --enable ansible-2-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms

      2. Install Ansible Engine: 

        # yum install ansible
    • If you have a Red Hat Ansible Engine Subscription, follow the procedure described in How do I Download and Install Red Hat Ansible Engine?.

  • Ensure that you are able to create an Ansible inventory.

    Inventories represent the hosts, host groups, and some of the configuration parameters used by the Ansible playbooks.

    Playbooks are typically human-readable, and are defined in ini, yaml, json, and other file formats.

  • Ensure that you are able to create an Ansible playbook.

    Playbooks represent Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. By using playbooks, you can declare and manage configurations of remote machines, deploy multiple remote machines or orchestrate steps of any manual ordered process.

    A playbook is a list of one or more plays. Every play can include Ansible variables, tasks, or roles.

    Playbooks are human-readable, and are defined in the yaml format.

Procedure

  1. Create the required Ansible inventory containing the hosts and groups that you want to manage. Here is an example using a file called inventory.ini of a group of hosts called webservers: 

    [webservers]
host1
host2
host3

  2. Create an Ansible playbook including the required role. The following example shows how to use roles through the roles: option for a playbook:

    The following example shows how to use roles through the roles: option for a given play: 

    ---
- hosts: webservers
  roles:
     - rhel-system-roles.network
     - rhel-system-roles.timesync
    Note

    Every role includes a README file, which documents how to use the role and supported parameter values. You can also find an example playbook for a particular role under the documentation directory of the role. Such documentation directory is provided by default with the rhel-system-roles package, and can be found in the following location: 

    /usr/share/doc/rhel-system-roles/SUBSYSTEM/

    Replace SUBSYSTEM with the name of the required role, such as selinux, kdump, network, timesync, or storage.

  3. To execute the playbook on specific hosts, you must perform one of the following:

    • Edit the playbook to use hosts: host1[,host2,…​], or hosts: all, and execute the command: 

      # ansible-playbook name.of.the.playbook

    • Edit the inventory to ensure that the hosts you want to use are defined in a group, and execute the command: 

      # ansible-playbook -i name.of.the.inventory name.of.the.playbook

    • Specify all hosts when executing the ansible-playbook command: 

      # ansible-playbook -i host1,host2,... name.of.the.playbook
      Important

      Be aware that the -i flag specifies the inventory of all hosts that are available. If you have multiple targeted hosts, but want to select a host against which you want to run the playbook, you can add a variable in the playbook to be able to select a host. For example: 

      Ansible Playbook | example-playbook.yml:

- hosts: "{{ target_host }}"
  roles:
     - rhel-system-roles.network
     - rhel-system-roles.timesync

      Playbook execution command: 

      # ansible-playbook -i host1,..hostn -e target_host=host5 example-playbook.yml

Additional resources

1.4. Additional resources


[1] This documentation is installed automatically with the rhel-system-roles package.