Automating Cisco's DNA Center using Ansible!
These modules provide declarative and idempotent access to configure the design elements of Cisco's DNA Center.
1. DNA Center + Ansible
Ansible Modules for DNA Center
Jeff Andiorio Technical Solutions Architect
2. Why?
Need to integrate with existing Ansible automation?
Looking for automation flexibility? (self-service portal, NSO, ?)
Unify automation approach using Ansible
3. Ansible Modules for
DNA Center
Network Infrastructure
DNA Center as a Platform
DNA-C Modules
Group Hierarchy
Common Settings
Global Credentials
Credential Assignments
Discovery
IP Pools
Role Assignments
Site Assignments
7. Take-aways
• Checkout the repo DNA Center Modules for Ansible
• Watch the Redhat/WWT Webinar
• Contribute back!
Editor's Notes
Hi. I’m Jeff Andiorio, Technical Solutions Architect for World Wide Technology. Today we are going to talk about a set of Ansible modules i have developed for tasks applied to Cisco’s DNA Center.
Cisco’s DNA Center is an amazing new software defined networking controller that provides mechanisms for both Automating the network and Assuring it does what you expected it to do.
The Assurance component of DNAC is without parallel. The analytics and insights provided are currently unmatched in the industry and provide significant reduction in MTTR and in turn help to provide a better overall end user experience.
The ansible modules will make it simple to integrate DNA center automation tasks into your existing Ansible playbooks.
They will create flexibility in how you provisioned the network like call from service now or NSO or even just directly from Ansible / Ansible Tower.
Finally, they will Unify the automation approach by extending the same ansible awesomeness as found for Cisco ACI APIC to the DNA Center platform.
Orig-list
Automate Design workflows in DNA Center
Ansible as a top-level or middle-tier automation layer
Common / Seamless automation for Existing Ansible environments
Introducing the new Ansible Modules for DNA Center.
These modules provide for the ability to utilize the ease of ansible automation to configure Cisco’s DNA Center.
Combining this with Ansible Tower will also provide an API allowing for your simple network automation to be called from other systems like Serivce Now or NSO.
Network domain experts can easily consume these modules to build powerful automation solutions that include DNA Center.
There are currently ansible modules for dna center developed for a number of the design workflow tasks including:
Sites – building the site hierarchy
Common settings like dns, dhcp, syslog, banners, ntp, netflow, etc
Credentials – creating and associating CLI and SNMPv2 creds with sites
Discovery – creating discoveries
IP Pools – create the IP Pools in DNAC
Role Assignment =- update the role of a network device (ACCESS, DISTRIBUTION, BORDER, etc)
Site Assignments – assign a device to a particular site
Using the Ansible modules for DNA Center allow you to create simple playbooks in the familiar Ansible constructs to automate the configuration of DNA Center. I use this all the time in the lab environment when I have to reset things back to a basline and then reapply some of the values based on the lab. In a production environment it would be useful when either Ansible is your primary automation stragey as a top-level automator or in the case where you are using Ansible as a middle-layer.
Ansible has modules developed for a number of controllers that act as the entry point into the technical domain they serve (ACI / aPIC, Palo, GCP, etc). ACI has ~ 70 modules developed for interacting with and automating the data center fabric using ansible, adding modules to support DNA Center adds this capability to the campus controller. You can now build your automation in ansible across all places in the network.
The ansible modules provide the capability to use Ansible as a middle layer of abstraction for automation of DNA Center. Ansible’s rapid adoption in the network automation space is a testament to the relative ease of adoption. Network engineers are able to ramp up extremely quickly and begin automating the network. These modules add DNA Center as a possible target for that automation.
These new Ansible Modules are just the beginning of automating DNA Center using Ansible. Go out and checkout the repo, watch the included videos and create some new modules!