Building The Inventory; General Information About Ansible Inventory Files; General Structure - Quantum ActiveScale P100E3 Installation Manual

ActiveScale™ P100E3 Installation Guide
Note: Always double check the date and time defined on the VM installer before
continuing.
However if there's no Internet available and/or you see the date/time in the VM installer being off as
oposed to the actual UTC time, it's a good idea to set the clock correctly via the VM Installer UI. We don't
need split-second precision, but we do want to have the correct hour and ofcourse date set, so the
ActiveScale system has a nice starting point and does not need to jump time later on.

5.4 Building the inventory

The VM installer uses RedHat Ansible internally for its automation and modelling. Ansible has a concept
of 'inventory' in which we can fully describe the to-be-installed ActiveScale system. This chapter will
guide you through the creation of such an inventory to install a X200 or P100E3 ActiveScale system.
To ease this process, the installer includes self-describing template files under ~/
quantum_installer/inventories:
• X200.yaml: Template file for X200 6 node system
• P100E3.yaml: Template file for P100E3 3 node system
We recommend using these files or copying these to adapt them. Either way you need to remember the
filename for later steps of the installer. The filled-in inventory file needs to be placed in ~/
quantum_installer/inventories

5.4.1 General information about Ansible inventory files

The inventories used in the installer are in the yaml format. This means whitespace determines the
structure and precedence of items in the file. Be aware of this! Also mind the difference of TAB and spaces
on Unix-based systems of which the installer VM is an example.

5.4.2 General structure

Generally speaking, the installer inventory structure looks like this:
all:
children:
installers:
hosts:
installer:
ip_address: # IP of this installer in Private VLAN1
asnodes:
vars:
# here are all configuration options set
...
hosts:
CMB01:
mac_address:
bmc_address:
...
So we have 2 types of systems: installers and asnodes. There will always only be one installer defined
under installers. In essence this is the installer VM, but specified in the Private VLAN. The number of
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