Genie Ansible Demo for CLEUR

There are four playbooks to demonstrate the Ansible Genie collection capabilities.

Installation

1. Clone the repo.
   • git clone https://github.com/clay584/cleur_genie_demo.git && cd cleur_genie_demo
2. Create a virtual environment and activate it with Python 3.4 or newer.
   • python3 -m venv .venv
3. Activate the venv
   • source .venv/bin/activate
4. Install the requirements.
   • pip install -r requirements.txt
5. Re-activate the venv
   • deactivate && source .venv/bin/activate

Cisco Sandbox

This demo uses the NX-OS always-on sandbox. The inventory file has sbx-nxos-mgmt.cisco.com in it and will connect to this device. You can change it if you want in the inventory file.

Playbook Usage

1.yml

$ ansible-playbook 1.yml

This playbook learns the arp feature and prints the data structure to the screen. It also will fail if the input_drops are greater than zero. This is meant to show how to use specific pieces of data returned in future plays or tasks within Ansible.

2.yml

$ ansible-playbook 2.yml

This playbook starts with learning the ospf feature. Then the playbook pauses to let the presenter to change some aspect of OSPF configuration on the router manually. Then, pressing ctrl+c and c, the next play will kick off, which learns the ospf feature a second time, and prints the diff of what changed with the ospf feature.

3.yml

$ ansible-playbook 3.yml

This playbook starts with learning the vlan feature. Then the playbook pauses to let the presenter to create, change, delete a vlan on the device manually. Then, pressing ctrl+c and c, the next play will kick off, which learns the vlan feature a second time, and prints the diff of what changed with the vlan feature.

4.yml

$ ansible-playbook 4.yml

This playbook learns the routing feature and stores it for use later in the playbook. It then runs a second task to learn it again, this time showing the ability to disable all of the default key exclusions in genie, and let the user specify their own list of keys to exclude from the diff. The output of the playbook shows that nothing changed with the routing feature between the two learn_genie tasks that were run. If you edit the playbook and comment out the exclude parameter, the diff output will show that uptime changed.

5.yml

$ ansible-playbook 5.yml

This playbook utilizes the parse_genie filter plugin to take raw CLI output and parse it using the genie parse library. This playbook does not actually reach out to a live device, as there is a locally defined variable that holds the raw CLI output from show inventory from an ios-xe device.