Ansible & CVP Integration Framework

This repo focuses on the basic interactions between CVP and Ansible using the Arista AVD/CVP Collections. It allows the user flexibility in managing device configurations with CVP and Ansible. Configlets make up a device's full configuration. You can manage the configlets inside of CVP or generate them dynamically with Ansible and merge them inside of CVP.

Requirements

• Python 3 & Ansible 2.9+
• Clone Arista AVD and CVP collections (instructions below)
• Update ansible.cfg with collections_path

Recommendation

Use a Docker Container with all necessary modules installed. Consider building a docker image and container from the instructions found here: https://github.com/mthiel117/dockerbuild.

Once the image is built run the container and attach it a volume to local directory and location of Arista collections. Sample Docker Run below. Turn this into a alias for simple launching.

docker run -it --rm -v $(PWD):/projects -v ~/git_projects/arista-ansible:/collections mycentosbox/base

Clone Arista AVD & CVP Collections

# Create a directory for collections
mkdir collections
cd collections

# Clone Arista AVD & CVP collections
git clone https://github.com/aristanetworks/ansible-avd.git
git clone https://github.com/aristanetworks/ansible-cvp.git

Update ansible.cfg with the path to the Arista AVD & CVP collections

[defaults]
collections_paths = /collections/ansible-cvp:/collections/ansible-avd/

Data Inputs

There are a few files that need to be updated to provide data input for the playbooks.

• inventory.yml - Update CVP host with ip or fqdn of your CVP system
• datafiles/svis.yml - Dictionary for SVI's to be applied to Devices
• datafiles/devices.csv - List of Devices (CSV format) used to create base configlets
• group_vars/CVP_SERVERS/authconnection.yml - CVP login and password and connection info
• group_vars/CVP_SERVERS/containers.yml - Dictionary of Container Topology
• group_vars/CVP_SERVERS/devices.yml - Dictionary of Devices, Containers, Configlets

Playbooks

There are 2 main playbooks that we will focus on.

• playbooks/generate_configs.yml - Generates Base configlets for each device and Common SVIs

• playbooks/update_cvp.yml - Updates Continer Topology & Uploads configlets into CVP and attaches them to the appropriate device and/or container. Tags (upload,update,full) are used to control which tasks are executed in playbook

  • upload tag will execute task to upload configlet to CVP
  • update tag will execute tasks to move devices, attach configlets and create container topology
  • full tag will execute all tasks above

Running playbooks

# Generate Configs
ansible-playbook playbooks/generate_configs.yml

# Upload Configlets
ansible-playbook playbooks/update_cvp.yml --tags upload

# Update Device configlets and Container Topology
ansible-playbook playbooks/update_cvp.yml --tags update

# Do Everything: Upload Configlets and Update Device configlets and Container Topology
ansible-playbook playbooks/update_cvp.yml --tags full