• ansible-consul-cluster
  • Assumptions
  • Requirements
  • Usage
    • Spinning Up VMs
      • Updating Variables
      • Spinning Up and Provisioning
  • License
  • Author Information

The purpose of this repo is to provision out a 3-node Consul cluster. The
inspiration behind this repo was a ready to roll Consul backend for Terraform.

The following list of assumptions are made but may be adjusted as neccessary.

1. Functional vSphere environment including vCenter.
2. Ubuntu (preferred) VM template available in vCenter.
3. DHCP is available to assign IP addresses to VMs when they spin up.

NOTE: If you need an easy way to provision vSphere templates checkout my repo
Packer-For-vSphere-and-More.

Create group_vars/all/accounts.yml with the following contents (adapt to your
environment):

---
# Defines Linux SSH password
ansible_password: packer

# Defines Linux SSH user
ansible_user: packer

# Defines vCenter password
vcenter_password: VMw@re1!

# Defines vCenter username
vcenter_username: administrator@vsphere.local

NOTE: The above file is excluded from version control to ensure that account
info is not leaked. You can also use ansible-vault if needed but you will
need to remove accounts.yml from .gitignore.

You will first need to spin up 3 VMs for the Consul cluster. These VMs are to
be provisioned in a vSphere environment.

Modify the following to meet your environment requirements:

1. group_vars/all/vms.yml
2. group_vars/all/dns.yml
3. group_vars/all/vcenter.yml

You also will need to adjust the following for Consul.

group_vars/consul_cluster/consul.yml:

# Generated using 'uuidgen'
# make sure to generate a new token and replace this one
consul_acl_master_token: 7A993C85-1EA6-412D-85DB-DA14EFCD03AB

# Generate using 'consul keygen'
# make sure to generate a new key and replace this
# also update key if you changed the it in your cluster via 'consul keyring',
# otherwise the role may deploy an outdated key to additional nodes which then
# can't join the cluster
consul_encryption_key: OJVXXkKdwifyqc9BrDe1VQ==

To spin up the VMs:

provision_vms.yml:

ansible-playbook provisioned_vms.yml

After the VMs have been provisioned, hosts.inv will be populated to use as
Ansible inventory.

To provision the VMs:

playbook.yml:

ansible-playbook -i hosts.inv playbook.yml

MIT

Larry Smith Jr.

• EverythingShouldBeVirtual
• @mrlesmithjr
• mailto:mrlesmithjr@gmail.com