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2021#

Nautobot Ansible Collection: Site Module

This post dives into the Nautobot Ansible Content Collection sites module to create/update a Site. This series for the beginning will be a clone of what I had done previously with NetBox. So some of the language will be very similar.

When it comes to creating and deleting sites in Nautobot, the question of should I be using Ansible to do this? In my opinion this is a yes it should be. Most likely an IT tool is not the tool that will be the Source of Truth as it comes to physical sites involved in an organization. So this module in particular that should be looked at and put into production use with Ansible.

Nautobot Ansible Collection: Installation

This is the first post as I shift into taking a closer look at the Nautobot Ansible Collection. The collection includes many of the needed modules to effectively manage your Nautobot environment. If This will take a deeper dive into several of the components of the inventory plugin, but not all of the options. The documentation for all of the collection can be found at:

This post is going to give information on how to install the collection as it may be applicable to every post in the series (as they get posted).

If you were a user of the NetBox Ansible Collection previously, you will notice a few differences. The first big difference in the modules is that there is no preface of nautobot_ before each module. Since this Collection is developed after Ansible 2.10 they are using the FQCN (Fully Qualified Collection Name), there is no longer the need to prefix the name to the module name. So where there was a netbox_device before it will now be just device, underneath the FQCN of networktocode.nautobot.device as an example.

NetBox Ansible Collection: Device Roles

A device role is aptly named, the role of the device. This is likely to be something that is meaningful to your organization and could change. For example you may have the 3 tier system of Core, Distribution, and Access layer environments. These are just fine. So you would want to have the roles there to reflect this reality. You may have leaf-spine environments, there are two more roles. And in my past I have also had roles that would indicate that there are dedicated DMZ, WAN edge, Internet edge devices. So this is the place to set this.

Note

This post was created when NetBox was an open source project used often in my automation framework. I have moved on to using Nautobot due to the project vision and providing a methodology that will drive network automation forward further. You may want to take a look at it yourself.

NetBox Ansible Collection: Device Types

A device type is the next piece in the NetBox Device onboarding requirements. The device type corresponds to the model number of the hardware (or virtual machine). This is where you are able to template out devices during their creation. So if you have a console port on a device type, that console port will be created when you create the device. However, there is NOT a relationship built between the device type and the device. If the device type gets updated after the device is created, the device itself is not updated.

Note

This post was created when NetBox was an open source project used often in my automation framework. I have moved on to using Nautobot due to the project vision and providing a methodology that will drive network automation forward further. You may want to take a look at it yourself.

NetBox Ansible Collection: Devices

All of the work through the modules thus far in the series have brought us to what we all want to see. How to get or update device information inside of NetBox. Adding of sites, device types, device roles are required to get us to this point. Now you can see how to add a device to NetBox using the netbox.netbox.netbox_device module.

Note

This post was created when NetBox was an open source project used often in my automation framework. I have moved on to using Nautobot due to the project vision and providing a methodology that will drive network automation forward further. You may want to take a look at it yourself.