First, let us clarify the terminology we will use in the context of Ansible. We will refer to the virtual machine with Ansible installed as the control machine, and the machine is being managed as the target machines or managed nodes. Ansible can be installed on most of the Unix systems with the only dependency of Python 2.6 or 2.7; the current Windows is not supported as the control machine. Windows host can still be managed by Ansible, as they are just not supported as the control machine.

On the managed node requirements, you may notice that Python 2.4 or later is a requirement. This is true for managing target nodes with operating systems such as Linux, but obviously, not all network equipment support Python. We will see how this requirement is bypassed for networking modules.

We will be installing Ansible on our Ubuntu virtual machine, and for instructions on installation on other operating systems, check out the installation document (http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_installation.html). Following you will see the steps to install the software packages.

$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ansible

You can now do a quick verification as follows:

$ ansible --version
ansible 2.2.1.0
 config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
 configured module search path = Default w/o overrides

Now, we are ready to see an example.