Ansible Meetup FI - Ansible use cases with enterprise application

© Wärtsilä PUBLIC
Ansible @Wärtsilä
Ansible use cases with legacy application, Siemens Teamcenter
Harri Piili
Solution Architect
Product Engineering & Lifecycle Management Services
Information Management
3.4.2019 [Presentation name / Author]1

WÄRTSILÄ CORPORATION
OUR PERSONNEL
Approximately 19,000 professionals
In over 200 locations
In more than 80 countries

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY
PRODUCT ENGINEERING &
LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
SERVICES
PDM/PLM
Product Data Management
Product Lifecycle Management
Main PDM/PLM solutions in
use is Siemens Teamcenter
~1000 users
Purpose
Via PDM/PLM service Product engineers can have
access to Wärtsilä’s product portfolio at any
location, which allows them to utilize existing
designs and ensure that designs are functional
while using resources more efficiently when
businesses will collaborate over organizational
barriers and share Products and Solutions
information throughout the lifecycle.

BACKGROUND

• We have multiple environments – Production,
PreProduction, QA, ~20 Devs
• Using Ansible for refreshing PreProduction and
QA quarterly as a copy of Production
• Using Ansible for setting up Teamcenter clones
in 6 hours instead of 6 days
• Improved consistency of system
deployments
• Deploying stories and changes to QA and Dev
environments
• Still ramping up the confidence for Prod
deployments
[Presentation name / Author]6
Using Ansible to configure Teamcenter systems
HIGHLIGHTS
3.4.2019
COULD NOT HAVE DONE ALL THIS
WITHOUT A GOOD PARTNER
THANKS EFICODE / HOWARD GUO

© Wärtsilä PUBLIC 3.4.2019 [Presentation name / Author]7
Various use cases
• Copy SQL Server Database from
instance to another
• Copying Teamcenter related binaries to
target servers
• Modifying environment specific
configuration files
• Creating directories, network shares and
controlling accesses
• Running application utilities to configure
system
• Creating OS services
• Installing and configuring IIS and
applications under it
• Deploying related Tomcat services
• Deploying changes via Jenkins using
Ansible
Pretty complicated system to configure and running on Windows

Prerequisites before starting configuration
• Setting up Ansible authentication using
Kerberos against Windows Active
Directory
• Automating Ansible AWX Environment
setup with Terraform and Ansible at
Amazon EC2
• Authenticating Ansible in BitBucket -
access keys
• Defining Ansible variable strategy
• Setting up AWX inventory from git repo
• Authenticating AWX users to Active
Directory using LDAP
• Patching old Win 2008R2 servers
• Doing investigation spikes

ANSIBLE AWX SETUP

Setting up the project
• Started by defining credentials
• Git users, service user, DB users etc.
• AWX automatically keeps these as
secrets
• Defined a project
• Connected to git
• Defined to synchronize automatically

LDAP Authentication and credentials in AWX
• AWX can authenticate logins
using LDAP
• A new user gets added, when
user logs in

Inventories
• You can define AWX inventory to be fetched
from various sources, like source control,
cloud provider services, vmware, custom
scripts.
• We chose inventory from project source i.e.
from git
• Each time we create a new Teamcenter
environment, we create a new inventory
subdir in git
• AWX automatically synchronizes the inventory
• Using Ansible in Windows environment
of needs some winrm settings
• ansible_connection: winrm
• ansible_winrm_kerberos_delegation: true
• ansible_winrm_operation_timeout_sec: 60
• ansible_winrm_read_timeout_sec: 70
• ansible_winrm_server_cert_validation: ignore
• ansible_winrm_transport: kerberos

Playbooks – AWX Templates
• Defined templates and divided them into
• 20 Adhoc template – configurations
that can run independently
• 6 ’workflow’ templates, that execute
sequentially other templates
• We decided not to use AWX Workflows
• It was hard to track versions in AWX
WF module
• import_playbook works well enough

Sequential workflow
• All is for now executed sequentially
• Starting from main refresh playbook
• Executing all sub books one by one
• We don’t have such critical requirements
at the moment, as long as we can
deliver within one day

ANSIBLE USE CASES

Use case 1: Copy SQL Server Database from instance to another
• Playbook utilizes PowerShell and
DbaTools / dbatools.io
• Ansible Modules and Galaxy has limited
support for SQL Server
• Mostly only installing the SQL server,
not the stuff we need to do
• Could have used PowerShell SQL
Server modules, but dbatools was
superior
• Save some existing information from database using
SQL queries
• Copy existing database from one instance to another
• Backup into a file in original server (Backup-
DbaDatabase)
• Copy backup file to another server
• Read information about the backup, like file
locations (Read-DbaBackupHeader)
• Define new DB file locations
• Restore to the new server (Restore-DbaDatabase)
• Calling multiple queries (Invoke-DbaSqlQuery)
• Change recovery model to Simple
• Shrink logfiles
• Disabling triggers
• Granting DEV accesses to the DB
• Update restored database contents to suit the new
environment
• Had to submit a PRs for dbatools related to credentials and
PowerShell compatibility

Use case 2: Refresh Application binaries from prod to <target>
• Copy Java runtime and application
binaries
• Update configuration files
• Create new win network shares
• Run application commands
• Manipulate XML files
• Install Windows services
• Copying ~7 GB of files – you need
something else than ansible_copy
• win_robocopy does the trick
• we had to fix timeout/memory issues in
PowerShell by Windows Patch
• Instead of changing configuration files
from Prod, we created jinja templates that
set the environment correctly
• In different modules the vs / is all over
the place
• Manipulating and reading XML files is
challenging
• Ansible vs PowerShell encodings.
• Sometimes result is UTF16 and sometimes
1251. We converted the results just in case.
# Caution: choice of encoding is determined by Ansible. Sometimes it is UTF16, sometimes it is 1251.
$backup_xml = [xml]([System.Text.Encoding]::GetEncoding("windows-
1251").GetString([System.Convert]::FromBase64String($backup_xml_b64)))

Use case 3: Install and configure IIS
• Install IIS feature using ansible module
• win_feature Web-WebServer and win_feature Web-Mgmt-Tools
• We exported prod IIS settings using appcmd
• appcmd list site /config /xml >site.xml
• appcmd list apppool /config /xml >pool.xml
• We created Jinja template from this
• Installing sites and app pools in IIS using ’appcmd’ in win_shell
• appcmd delete site ”<name>”
• appcmd delete apppool ”<name>”
• Get-Content site.xml | &$appcmd add site /in
• Get-Content pool.xml | &$appcmd add apppool /in

Use case 4: Calling Ansible from Jenkins
• Defined in Pipeline groovy definition
• Using Ansible as handy way to do
remote calls
• The playbook is utilizing our pre-
Ansible deployment script in the
server
• Our pipeline :
• Creating a change in ServiceNow
• Creating configuration files and
sources in git
• Creating a <change#>.yml file in git to
define what deployables are part of
the change.
• Deploy change using Jenking

After automating the system
deployment and configuration,
Teamcenter cloud deployment makes
sense
Only Dev deployment to start with
Start calling playbooks from AWX API
Start triggering Ansible playbooks
from ServiceNow
Start deploying changes to Prod
Increase coverage of Ansible
playbooks to secondary use cases
WHAT NEXT?

THANK YOU
ANSIBLE COMMUNITY
Harri Piili
Solution Architect
Product Engineering & Lifecycle Management Services
Wärtsilä Information Management
Tel. +358 10 709 0000
Mob +358 50 5667309
harri.piili@wartsila.com
Wärtsilä Corporation
Hiililaiturinkuja 2
FI–00180 Helsinki, Finland
www.wartsila.com

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