By Robert Locke | 55 Min Video

By tightly integrating Red Hat’s open source technologies with Cisco’s networking, compute, and security expertise, the partnership solves the complexity of modern, containerized deployments, enabling true portability and agility for the customer.

The partnership leverages Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate the provisioning, configuration, and day-two operations of both the Cisco infrastructure and the Red Hat software stack (RHEL, OpenShift, Storage). Customers can use a single, declarative language to manage everything from Cisco switch ports to Kubernetes cluster upgrades, maximizing operational efficiency and consistency.

Our presenter covers:

• Identify the partnership elements:
  • Red Hat OpenShift on Cisco UCS and HyperFlex (HCI)
  • Unified automation with RH Ansible Automation Platform
• A technical overview of RH Ansible Automation Platform
  • Infrastructure as code
  • Playbooks, tasks, and modules
  • Roles and content collections
• How to leverage the new Red Hat Training curriculum available in the Red Hat Learning Subscription to build and manage automation that scales

*This webinar was hosted in partnership with Red Hat.

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Partnership Architecture & Deployment Strategy

• Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) with Red Hat technology deliver tested architectures for standardized, repeatable deployments, reducing risk and accelerating time to market while providing end-to-end Cisco solution support across the entire stack.
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform features over 180 certified content collections co-developed with 70+ technology partners, providing a single declarative language to manage everything from Cisco switch ports to Kubernetes cluster upgrades.

Automation Lifecycle & Operations

• AAP automates day 1 operations (initial configurations, app deployments) and day 2 operations (event-driven automation, GitOps) across physical, virtual, cloud, and containerized environments, delivering automation closer to endpoints for operational resilience.
• AAP enables VM lifecycle management (config updates, snapshots, backups, resource allocation) and hybrid cloud operations across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, OpenShift, VMware, and Nutanix through unified automation workflows.
• AAP combines Git, infrastructure as code, and Ansible for CI/CD pipelines, automatically applying the latest infrastructure code from Git repositories to environments, enabling DevOps benefits through declarative automation workflows.

Ansible Technical Components

• Ansible playbooks written in YAML consist of plays (defining target machines), tasks (using parameterized modules like template), and plugins (augmenting core functionality), executing ordered sequences representing infrastructure automation goals.
• Ansible roles package automation tasks and variables in reusable formats with known file structures that automatically load related variables, files, tasks, and handlers, enabling internal and external sharing for broader automation adoption.
• Ansible content collections contain modules, multiple roles, and opinionated playbooks for typical use cases, enabling better collaboration through versioning, independent release cycles, and coding best practices for simplified automation adoption.

Modern Automation Tools

• Ansible execution environments are self-contained images containing Ansible, content, and dependencies, ensuring consistent automation throughout the lifecycle, managed via Ansible Navigator command-line tool for development, troubleshooting, and execution review.
• Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant generates content suggestions from natural language prompts and Ansible YAML context, infusing best practices and transparency into code recommendations for efficient Ansible content creation.