Here’s a is a quick guide to get you started with a “Ansible core lab” using Vagrant.
Alright lets get started
TLDR Version
- Create project folder and CD in to it
Vagrant init
- Vagrant Provisioning Shell Script to Deploy Ansible – link
- Install the vagrant-vbguest plugin to deploy missing
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
- Bring up the Vagrant environment
Vagrant up
Install Vagrant and Virtual box
For this demo we are using windows 10 1909 but you can use the same guide for MAC OSX
Windows
Download Vagrant and virtual box and install it the good ol way –
https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
https://www.vagrantmanager.com/downloads/
Install the vagrant-vbguest plugin (We need this with newer versions of Ubuntu)
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
Or Using chocolatey
choco install vagrant
choco install virtualbox
choco install vagrant-manager
Install the vagrant-vbguest plugin (We need this with newer versions of Ubuntu)
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
MAC OSX – using Brewcask
Install virtual box
$ brew cask install virtualbox
Now install Vagrant either from the website or use homebrew for installing it.
$ brew cask install vagrant
Vagrant-Manager is a nice way to manage all your virtual machines in one place directly from the menu bar.
$ brew cask install vagrant-manager
Install the vagrant-vbguest plugin (We need this with newer versions of Ubuntu)
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
Setup the Vagrant Environment
Open Powershell
to get started lets check our environment
vagrant version
Create a project directory and Initialize the environment
for the project directory im using D:\vagrant
Open powershell and run
mkdir D:\vagrant
cd D:\vagrant
Initialize the environment under the project folder
vagrant init
this will create Two Items
.vagrant – Hidden folder holding Base Machines and meta data
Vagrantfile – Vagrant config file
Lets Create the Vagrantfile to deploy the VMs
https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vagrantfile/
The syntax of Vagrantfiles is Ruby this gives us a lot of flexibility to program in logic when building your files
Im using Atom to edit the vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.define "controller" do |controller|
controller.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
controller.vm.hostname = "LAB-Controller"
controller.vm.network "public_network", bridge: "Intel(R) I211 Gigabit Network Connection", ip: "172.17.10.120"
controller.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
vb.memory = "2048"
end
controller.vm.provision :shell, path: 'Ansible_LAB_setup.sh'
end
(1..3).each do |i|
config.vm.define "vls-node#{i}" do |node|
node.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
node.vm.hostname = "vls-node#{i}"
node.vm.network "public_network", bridge: "Intel(R) I211 Gigabit Network Connection" ip: "172.17.10.12#{i}"
node.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
vb.memory = "1024"
end
end
end
end
You can grab the code from my Repo
https://github.com/malindarathnayake/Ansible_Vagrant_LAB/blob/master/Vagrantfile
Let’s talk a little bit about this code and unpack this
Vagrant API version
Vagrant uses API versions for its configuration file, this is how it can stay backward compatible. So in every Vagrantfile we need to specify which version to use. The current one is version 2 which works with Vagrant 1.1 and up.
Provisioning the Ansible VM
This will
- Provision the controller Ubuntu VM
- Create a bridged network adapter
- Set the host-name – LAB-Controller
- Set the static IP – 172.17.10.120/24
- Run the Shell script that installs Ansible using apt-get install (We will get to this below)
Lets start digging in…
Specifying the Controller VM Name, base box and hostname
Vagrant uses a base image to clone a virtual machine quickly. These base images are known as “boxes” in Vagrant, and specifying the box to use for your Vagrant environment is always the first step after creating a new Vagrantfile.
You can find different base boxes from app.vagrantup.com
Or you can create custom base boxes for pretty much anything including “CiscoVIRL(CML)” images – keep an eye out for the next article on this
Network configurations
controller.vm.network "public_network", bridge: "Intel(R) I211 Gigabit Network Connection", ip: "your IP"
in this case, we are asking it to create a bridged adapter using the Intel(R) I211 NIC and set the IP address you defined on under IP attribute
You can the relavant interface name using
get-netadapter
You can also create a host-only private network
controller.vm.network :private_network, ip: "10.0.0.10"
for more info checkout the network section in the KB
https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/networking/
Define the provider and VM resources
We declaring virtualbox(we installed this earlier) as the provider and setting VM memory to 2048
You can get more granular with this, refer to the below KB
https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/virtualbox/configuration.html
Define the shell script to customize the VM config and install the Ansible Package
Now this is where we define the provisioning shell script
this script installs Ansible and set the host file entries to make your life easier
In case you are wondering VLS stands for V=virtual,L – linux S – server.
I use this naming scheme for my VMs. Feel free to use anything you want; make sure it matches what you defined on the Vagrantfile under node.vm.hostname
!/bin/bash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install software-propetise-common -y
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ansible -y
echo "
172.17.10.120 LAB-controller
172.17.10.121 vls-node1
172.17.10.122 vls-node2
172.17.10.123 vls-node3" >> /etc/hosts
create this file and save it as Ansible_LAB_setup.sh in the Project folder
in this case I’m going to save it under D:\vagrant
You can also do this inline with a script block instead of using a separate file
https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/provisioning/basic_usage.html
Provisioning the Member servers for the lab
We covered most of the code used above, the only difference here is we are using each method to create 3 VMs with the same template (I’m lazy and it’s more convenient)
This will create three Ubuntu VMs with the following Host-names and IP addresses, you should update these values to match you LAN, or use a private Adapter
vls-node1 – 172.17.10.121
vls-node2 – 172.17.10.122
vls-node1 – 172.17.10.123
So now that we are done with explaining the code, let’s run this
Building the Lab environment using Vagrant
Issue the following command to check your syntax
Vagrant status
Issue the following command to bring up the environment
Vagrant up
If you get this message Reboot in to UEFI and make sure virtualization is enabled
Intel – VT-D
AMD Ryzen – SVM
If everything is kumbaya you will see vagrant firing up the deployment
It will provision 4 VMs as we specified
Notice since we have the “vagrant-vbguest” plugin installed, it will reinstall the relevant guest tools along with the dependencies for the OS
==> vls-node3: Machine booted and ready!
[vls-node3] No Virtualbox Guest Additions installation found.
rmmod: ERROR: Module vboxsf is not currently loaded
rmmod: ERROR: Module vboxguest is not currently loaded
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Package 'virtualbox-guest-x11' is not installed, so not removed
The following packages will be REMOVED:
virtualbox-guest-utils*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 5799 kB disk space will be freed.
(Reading database ... 61617 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing virtualbox-guest-utils (6.0.14-dfsg-1) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.7-3) ...
(Reading database ... 61604 files and directories currently installed.)
Purging configuration files for virtualbox-guest-utils (6.0.14-dfsg-1) ...
Processing triggers for systemd (242-7ubuntu3.7) ...
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
linux-headers-5.3.0-51-generic is already the newest version (5.3.0-51.44).
linux-headers-5.3.0-51-generic set to manually installed.
Check the status
Vagrant status
Testing
Connecting via SSH to your VMs
vagrant ssh controller
“Controller” is the VMname we defined before not the hostname, You can find this by running Vagrant status on posh or your terminal
We are going to connect to our controller and check everything
Little bit more information on the networking side
Vagrant Adds two interfaces, for each VM
NIC 1 – Nat’d in to the host (control plane for Vagrant to manage the VMs)
NIC 2 – Bridged adapter we provisioned in the script with the IP Address
Default route is set via the Private(NAT’d) interface (you cant change it)
Netplan configs
Vagrant creates a custom netplan yaml for interface configs
Destroy/Tear-down the environment
vagrant destroy -f
https://www.vagrantup.com/intro/getting-started/teardown.html
I hope this helped someone. when I started with Vagrant a few years back it took me a few tries to figure out the system and the logic behind it, this will give you a basic understanding on how things are plugged together.
let me know in the comments if you see any issues or mistakes.
Until Next time…..
