After the previous Ansible introductory talk we will walk through setting up a basic configuration for a simple computing cluster created with virtual machines. As an introductory step we will briefly present Vagrant, a tool which will allow us to create reproducible and portable virtual machine development and testing environments.
Using a very simple Vagrant configuration file we will setup a test cluster with a head node and a few computing nodes. Within the head node we will download Ansible, build a rpm package and install it. We will then write the inventory file with nodes of different types, make some test runs and create a basic Ansible playbook for eg. install some packages, distribute some configuration files and configure some services both in the head and the computing nodes.
The Vagrant configuration file and virtual machine template (Vagrant “box”) as well as the base Ansible files we will use will be provided beforehand so that anyone interested will be able to follow along the session in his/her laptop.
