Automate AIX and IBM i operations with Ansible on IBM Power Systems

IT organizations are actively looking for ways to modernize software development and IT operations. However, most of them run on multiple operating environments. According to a 2020 HelpSystem survey of IBM i users, more than 80 percent of respondents run other environments like Linux, AIX and Windows along with IBM i. Each environment comes with its own set of administrative tools and processes, which makes it challenging to establish modern agile and DevOps processes consistently. Often modern agile and DevOps processes are adopted only in new implementations. So, how can you successfully apply these processes across the entire IT stack?

Start by establishing a consistent approach to automate IT operations across the various operating system (OS) environments. Manual OS build takes significant admin hours. Its reliability depends on the admin’s experience and skills. In fact, one of the common challenges we hear from AIX and IBM i users is that this skills gap is increasing. Most organizations run hundreds of these environments. This means admins will need to repeat their build processes across multiple environments and they also need to validate that the correct security baseline is applied. With manual processes, there is a high likelihood for errors and delays. Automating these processes will enable admins to quickly deliver reliable OS images on demand.

However, consistent automation across multiple OS environments requires a tool that works across all environments. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is that tool. It is built on the open source community project sponsored by Red Hat and can be used across IT teams — from systems and network administrators to developers and managers. Red Hat Ansible provides enterprise-ready solutions to automate your entire application lifecycle — from servers to clouds to containers and everything in between.

Ansible content for AIX and IBM i helps enable IBM Power Systems users to integrate these operating systems into their existing Ansible-based enterprise automation approach. This also helps address the AIX and IBM i skills gap, since admins can leverage their existing Ansible skills to automate these environments. Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Power Systems, delivered with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, is designed to provide easy-to-use modules that can accelerate the automation of operating system configuration management. Users can also take advantage of the open source Ansible community-provided content (i.e., no enterprise support available) to automate hybrid cloud operations on IBM Power Systems.

Source: ibm.com