{"id":5633,"date":"2020-10-14T15:53:24","date_gmt":"2020-10-14T22:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.infoblox.com\/?p=5633"},"modified":"2022-10-19T16:28:27","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T23:28:27","slug":"infoblox-is-pleased-to-announce-the-brand-new-infoblox-nios-collection-for-ansible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.infoblox.com\/blog\/community\/infoblox-is-pleased-to-announce-the-brand-new-infoblox-nios-collection-for-ansible\/","title":{"rendered":"Infoblox is Pleased to Announce the Brand New Infoblox NIOS Collection for Ansible"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a popular open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, interservice orchestration, and provisioning. Ansible extends beyond traditional tools for server and software installations to encompass the entirety of IT infrastructure, including network resources.<\/p>\n

With the new Infoblox NIOS Collection for Ansible, organizations can maximize their cloud investments by automating core network services.<\/p>\n

The Need for Network Automation<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Traditionally, IPAM has been done via spreadsheets. The network administrators maintained the IP address landscape, where they manually added or deleted IP addresses from the spreadsheets whenever hosts are added or deleted from the network. That doesn’t work in today’s dynamic environments and makes the entire IPAM lifecycle management tedious and prone to error. In large organizations, end-users might have to submit internal tickets for IP address record fulfillments that can take hours, if not days. And then there is the cleanup \u2013 again, a time consuming and error-prone effort. The result? These legacy approaches often delay workload deployments and diminish the automation and orchestration advantages that organizations wanted.<\/p>\n

The Infoblox NIOS Collection for Ansible Automation Platform<\/a> is a package of modules and plugins that allows managing Infoblox Network Identity Operating System (NIOS) objects and functions through APIs leveraging Ansible playbooks. Dynamic inventory is one of the powerful features in Red Hat Ansible Tower, which allows Ansible to query external systems and use the response data to construct its inventory. The combined Infoblox\/Red Hat solution enables network professionals to overcome the burden of maintaining a static registry of devices and gain a centralized and highly efficient way to manage DNS, DHCP, and IPAM (DDI) automation of VMs and containerized workloads deployed across multiple platforms.<\/p>\n

Infoblox and Ansible Integration Benefits: Enhancing the Ansible Experience<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The Infoblox NIOS Collection for Ansible provides 16 modules<\/a> and four plugins included with Ansible 2.9. It enables networking teams to leverage Ansible NIOS modules and plugins to automate Infoblox Core Network Services for IPAM, DNS, and inventory tracking for workloads deployed across multiple platforms. It frees network administrators from frequent repetitive requests or tasks with high error rates, including IP address assignments, DNS record creation, and cleanup of everything once a resource is no longer needed.<\/p>\n

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The Infoblox NIOS Collection for Ansible provides single-point comprehensive VM automation and containerized workload deployments across multiple platforms. By integrating Infoblox DDI capabilities with Ansible automation, organizations can:<\/p>\n