Physical Network Configuration¶

Adding Devices to the Inventory¶

Network devices should be added to the Kayobe Ansible inventory, and should be members of the switches group.

[switches]
switch0
switch1

In some cases it may be useful to differentiate different types of switches, For example, a mgmt network might carry out-of-band management traffic, and a ctl network might carry control plane traffic. A group could be created for each of these networks, with each group being a child of the switches group.

[switches:children]
mgmt-switches
ctl-switches

[mgmt-switches]
switch0

[ctl-switches]
switch1

Network Device Configuration¶

Configuration is typically specific to each network device. It is therefore usually best to add a host_vars file to the inventory for each device. Common configuration for network devices can be added in a group_vars file for the switches group or one of its child groups.

---
# Host configuration for switch0
ansible_host: 1.2.3.4

---
# Host configuration for switch1
ansible_host: 1.2.3.5

---
# Group configuration for 'switches' group.
ansible_user: alice

Common Configuration Variables¶

The type of switch should be configured via the switch_type variable. See Device-specific Configuration Variables for details of the value to set for each device type.

ansible_host should be set to the management IP address used to access the device. ansible_user should be set to the user used to access the device.

Global switch configuration is specified via the switch_config variable. It should be a list of configuration lines to apply.

Per-interface configuration is specified via the switch_interface_config variable. It should be an object mapping switch interface names to configuration objects. Each configuration object contains a description item and a config item. The config item should contain a list of per-interface configuration lines.

The switch_interface_config_enable_discovery and switch_interface_config_disable_discovery variables take the same format as the switch_interface_config variable. They define interface configuration to apply to enable or disable hardware discovery of bare metal compute nodes.

---
ansible_host: 1.2.3.4

ansible_user: alice

switch_config:
  - global config line 1
  - global config line 2

switch_interface_config:
  interface-0:
    description: controller0
    config:
      - interface-0 config line 1
      - interface-0 config line 2
  interface-1:
    description: compute0
    config:
      - interface-1 config line 1
      - interface-1 config line 2

Network device configuration can become quite repetitive, so it can be helpful to define group variables that can be referenced by multiple devices. For example:

---
# Group configuration for the 'switches' group.
switch_config_default:
  - default global config line 1
  - default global config line 2

switch_interface_config_controller:
  - controller interface config line 1
  - controller interface config line 2

switch_interface_config_compute:
  - compute interface config line 1
  - compute interface config line 2

---
ansible_host: 1.2.3.4

ansible_user: alice

switch_config: "{{ switch_config_default }}"

switch_interface_config:
  interface-0:
    description: controller0
    config: "{{ switch_interface_config_controller }}"
  interface-1:
    description: compute0
    config: "{{ switch_interface_config_compute }}"

Device-specific Configuration Variables¶