JBoss middleware orchestration with Ansible

This project is an example showing how to implement a Red Hat middleware Standard Operating Environment (SOE) using Ansible and Ansible Tower.

Prerequisites

To get started quickly with your SOE, you will need to install Ansible, Vagrant and VirtualBox locally. In addition to this, you will have to download and copy the Red Hat JBoss binaries from the Red Hat Customer Support Portal

1) Install Vagrant

Please follow those instructions to setup Vagrant.

2) Install Ansible

• Centos / RHEL / Other - Please follow the official instructions.
• MacOS - Please follow those instructions.

3) Install Maven

• Centos / RHEL / Other - Please install the maven package probably available for your platform.
• MacOS - Please follow those instructions.

4) Retrieve the required Red Hat JBoss binaries

You have to choose one out of the two following options to download the Red Hat JBoss binaries:

4.1) Re-using locally downloaded binaries

Please download the following Red Hat JBoss binaries from the Red Hat Customer Support Portal in a local directory of your choice (for example /opt/tools/jboss/bin).

• jboss-eap-6.4.0.zip
• jboss-eap-6.4.9-patch.zip
• jboss-eap-6.4.11-patch.zip
• jboss-eap-native-6.4.0-RHEL7-x86_64.zip
• jboss-eap-7.0.0.zip
• jboss-eap-7.0.3-patch.zip
• jws-application-servers-3.0.3-RHEL7-x86_64.zip
• jws-httpd-3.0.3-RHEL.zip

... and edit the group_vars/all-yml file to set the local_rh_bin_dir to the folder containing your zip files. For example:

	local_rh_bin_dir: /opt/tools/jboss/bin

4.2) Use your your Red Hat Customer Support Portal account to automatically download the binaries

Edit the group_vars/all-yml file to set your rhn_username and rhn_password and comment out the local_rh_bin_dir variable. For example:

	#local_rh_bin_dir: /opt/tools/jboss/bin
	rhn_username: MY_ACCESS_REDHAT_COM_USERNAME
	rhn_password: MY_ACCESS_REDHAT_COM_PASSWORD

5) (optional) Ansible Tower license

If you wish to use Ansible Tower, you will need ...

• to obtain a valid Ansible Tower license file
• to save the license file as "./vagrant/tower/license"

Setup

You have two options to provision your environment:

a) Without using Ansible Tower

	$ ./init.sh

b) Using Ansible Tower

	$ ./init.sh tower

In both cases, it will take a while to create all virtual machines and provision them.

Ansible Tower

After having intialized the JBoss middleware Standard Operating Environment (using ./init.sh tower), you should follow these steps to provision the virtual machines.

Using the credentials displayed at the end of the installation, you will be able to log into Ansible Tower (https://192.168.0.200/) and there:

1. Import the current git repository as a project

   • name: ansible_middleware_soe
   • scm type: git
   • scm url: git@github.com:Maarc/ansible_middleware_soe.git
   • scm branch: master

2. Define a job template

   • name: Roll-out JBoss middleware
   • job-type: Run
   • inventory: Development virtual machines
   • project: ansible_middleware_soe
   • playbook: site.yml
   • machine credential: Vagrant virtual machines (ssh)

3. Run the defined job template

Test

The deployed test applications can be accessed over the following URLs:

• Ticket-monster

  • host-dev-01 (load-balancer): http://192.168.0.101/ticket-monster/
  • host-dev-02 (JBoss EAP): http://192.168.0.102:8080/ticket-monster/
  • host-dev-03 (JBoss EAP) http://192.168.0.103:8080/ticket-monster/

• Petclinic

  • host-dev-01 (load-balancer): http://192.168.0.101/petclinic/
  • host-dev-02 (JBoss EAP): http://192.168.0.102:9080/petclinic/
  • host-dev-03 (JBoss EAP) http://192.168.0.103:9080/petclinic/

• Jenkins

  • host-dev-01 (load-balancer): http://192.168.0.101/jenkins/
  • host-dev-02 (JBoss EAP): http://192.168.0.102:10080/jenkins/
  • host-dev-03 (JBoss EAP) http://192.168.0.103:10080/jenkins/

• tomcat-sample

  • host-dev-01 (JWS): http://192.168.0.101:8000/tomcat-sample/

Project structure

Here is a brief description of the structure of this projects:

• files/cli contains the CLI files used for configuring JBoss EAP.
• group_vars contains the ansible group variables.
• inventory contains the ansible inventory. "hosts-dev" lists the host for the development environment. At the same level, you can add a "host-int" or "host-prod" file listing your orchestrated hosts in the integration or production staging environments.
• roles contains the main roles of this SOE implementations:

• roles/download-binaries retrieves the Red Hat binaries.
• roles/golden-image creates Red Hat JBoss golden images.
• roles/java-demo-app downloads and builds the demo Java applications.
• roles/Maarc.rh-jboss-common is the core role for all managed hosts.
• roles/Maarc.rh-jboss-eap is the basis role for JBoss EAP instances. The role is quite parametrizable, registers the instance as a service and supports multiple instances on a same host.
• roles/Maarc.rh-jboss-web-server-httpd is a role installing a JWS apache (HTTPD) server.
• roles/Maarc.rh-jboss-web-server-tomcat is a role installing a JWS Tomcat server.
• roles/sabre1041.redhat-csp-download is a role downloading Red Hat JBoss binaries from the customer portal.

• vagrant/Vagrantfile contains a description of the virtual machines managed by vagrant.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter an error looking like ...

	fatal: [host-dev-eap-01]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "SSH encountered an unknown error during the connection. We recommend you re-run the command using -vvvv, which will enable SSH debugging output to help diagnose the issue", "unreachable": true}

... either your virtual machine is down and you need to start it:

	cd vagrant; vagrant up host-dev-01; cd ..

... or restart it ...

	cd vagrant; vagrant reload host-dev-01; cd ..

... or you need to cleanup your .ssh/known_hosts file. For example like that:

	mv -n ~/.ssh/known_hosts{,_$(date +%s).orig}