Ansible ACI Modules

[Rod Oliver]

Hi All,

I'm aware of modules for ACI on Github (https://github.com/jedelman8/aci-ansible), however they haven't seen a lot of updates in the last while. Is anyone using them who might be prepared to chat about their experiences?

Rod 

[Dag Wieers]

Sure, I happen to know a thing or two about this and future roadmap.

--
Dag

[Rod Oliver]

Hi Dag,

Sorry about the late response. I was wondering how well used they are, how stable and reliable the modules are considered to be. The background is that my organisation is looking for a solution to migrate ACI provisioning and I'd like to advocate Ansible as a possibility but would like to get a bit of a sense on what others' experience and thoughts on Ansible ACI module, particularly since the my organisation's environment is an enterprise and needs some prodding before considering an open source solution such as Ansible and to add to that a 3rd party module.

Rod

[Dag Wieers]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2017, Rod Oliver wrote:

> Sorry about the late response. I was wondering how well used they are, how
> stable and reliable the modules are considered to be. The background is
> that my organisation is looking for a solution to migrate ACI provisioning
> and I'd like to advocate Ansible as a possibility but would like to get a
> bit of a sense on what others' experience and thoughts on Ansible ACI
> module, particularly since the my organisation's environment is an
> enterprise and needs some prodding before considering an open source
> solution such as Ansible and to add to that a 3rd party module.

Hi Rod,

Did not see your mail earlier.

These modules were used by various Cisco customers already, but despite
that they work there are a few problems:

- Not idempotent
- Not declarative
- Require CobraSDK (specific to your software levels)
- Not upstream

We are now working to fix all of this. You can find a list of things we
have done, and plan to do at:

https://github.com/ansible/community/wiki/Network:-ACI


Our aim is to have these modules upstream in v2.4 (but whether that will
happen depends on the project).

One thing is certain though, Ansible v2.4 will ship with aci_rest, and
that module provides access to everything within ACI through the REST
interface (without the need for CobraSDK). This is incredibly powerful
already, but not as user-friendly as the individual modules available at:

https://github.com/datacenter/aci-ansible


If you have any questions, or are interested to help improve these
modules, just let me know.

Kind regards,
--
Dag