Nothing works better than hands-on experience itself. For that we created
a set if playbooks to generate VM images (vmdk and qcow2) that work on
VMware, KVM, VirtualBox, ... and can be cloned as many times as needed.
Once booted the VM boots into a menu to pick the role of that VM (master,
web, database, ...).
The result being that with a minimum of effort, anyone can turn its laptop
into a bunch of networked machines. You designate one the "master" and
control the other systems from that master. (The images are made so that
there is an automatic trust between all of them).
So within a few minutes, together with your class, you can start to
install software, enable services, configure and orchestrate stuff to your
liking (and according to your company's standards).
By default we provide a basic walk-through for setting up a deployment
environment based on Ansible, Apache, PHP, MySQL and Git to learn the
basics, but it's easy to replace it with your own plan of action.
You can find the workshop playbooks as well as the workshop script at:
https://github.com/ansible-provisioning/ansible-workshop-v2
And I have made a set of images available (with instructions) from:
http://dag.wiee.rs/attic/ansible-workshop/
for a Ansible Meetup workshop we are doing tomorrow. If you have any
questions related to the workshop, let me know. We appreciate any feedback
that can help improve the workshop.
--
Dag