Introduction to EX457

0:00Hey friends and welcome to the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Network Automation. Now that's a mouthful. So what we're going to be doing in this particular course is mostly focused in on building out our lab environment. Pretty much we're going to be downloading some virtualization software. We're going to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux and then on that machine we're going to go and install Ansible. Now following that what we're going to then do is look at some options for getting access to networking devices so we can automate them using Ansible. Now just before we begin doing that what I want to do is just talk to you a little bit about what the exam actually entails. So with that said let's go and talk about it. Alright so straight off the bat from the exam description we can see here that this is a performance based test . What does that mean?

0:50Pretty much what we're talking about is that this is not going to be multiple choice. You are instead going to be in a hands-on environment whereby you have access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ansible and you're going to have to perform a series of tasks. So really what I'm saying here is that this course is going to really be focused on the practical application of Ansible itself. That means that you can walk into the exam and have confidence using the tool and not just knowing the basic theory. You know how to get hands-on and actually do this stuff. So that really has a big focus okay and by passing the exam you become a Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Network Automation and you know despite the fact that as a mouthful it still is a pretty good title to have I think so definitely worthwhile spending the time to learn this stuff and also by the way just to clarify you'll notice here that it also contributes to your Red Hat Certified Architect certification. Pretty much if my memory serves me correctly if you happen to get five individual special asserts like this one here you qualified to become a RHCA.

1:57So all good stuff. Now if we just look at the audience for this exam basically the target audience is network engineers, network admins, infrastructure engineers that type of thing but we want to be doing all of this stuff the manager of networks using Ansible Automation. So the question is what are the pre-reqs for the actual exam itself? Well the good news is is that there is no formal pre-requisite you can just go in and take the exam but in order to not to be overwhelmed with the exam these are the things that you're kind of expected to have familiarity with so basically understanding some concepts around network admins so you know about networking, routing and switching that type of stuff. You can I get to the command line on network devices happens to work you're going to have experience hopefully with some particular network providers so that could be Cisco, Juniper, the rest of that type of stuff and hopefully you'd also have some experience working any Linux command line environments and it also suggests that before you take the actual exam you should have some experience with things such as Visual Studio and them and having an understanding of things such as GET. Now the good news is in this course we are going to cover all this type of stuff so we'll look at things such as using Visual Studio Code which is actually what we'll install in this particular skill and upcoming skills we'll talk

3:15about things like them we'll talk about GETs we'll talk about you know basic Linux command line stuff and then really dig into the meat of using Ansible to automate network databases such as Cisco, Jun iper and Arista okay. Now what is actually covered here in the objectives? So some of the things that you can expect to see in the exam are these types of stuff right here so using a text editor to modify files running commands from the shell using SSH to lock into remote systems also by the way we'll talk about how we can build Infantones in Ansible use the automation content navigator, write and run playbooks the kind of core of Ansible that is and do other stuff like you know working with GET again we'll talk about this in upcoming skills now also by the way with respect to these playbooks well there's quite a bit to them but again if you're not we'll definitely be covering all this stuff so basically managing variables and facts we'll be implementing task controls like writing loops and conditional tasks see how we can handle task failures we'll be working with the actual controller itself so we can see how we can manage credentials that type of thing as well as a bunch of other cool things such as working with ginger templates creating automation roles performing backups all that good stuff so really that is the general overview of the exam itself these are the things we're going to have to know now like I say because this is

4:33a performance based exam that emphasis on practicality really cannot be stressed enough so it is so important that we have a working lab environment so because of that the rest of this skill is going to be focused just on that all right so what I will say is if you happen to have experience with Ansible you know how to set it up you know how to build a network automation lab you can automate devices with Ansible then feel free to skip the rest of this skill because pretty much that is what we're going to be focused in on so if you don't have experience the rest of these videos in this skill are certainly for you because once that's set up this is going to really prepare you for success on the exam itself so friends without further ado let's go begin building out that lab

0:00Alright friends, so what we're going to do in this particular video is we're going to go and get some virtualization software so that we can well, so we can virtualize our operating system. Now just to be clear here, there are different solutions that you can use for this virtualization. For example, one tool you can use is something known as virtual box. Another option is something known as UTM, and there are a few others, but the one that I'm going to be using is this one right here VMware. Now there isn't anything special about VMware, you can choose any which one you so much depending on your platform. VMware just happens to be my own personal platform, so this is the one I'm going to walk through the basic installation of. So once we have that up and running, then we'll go and get the operating system that we're going to be using for Ansible OK, so let's go and download VMware first then. So let's go to our browser here, and all I'm going to do is set for VMware Download OK, so it should take you to this website right here, OK?

0:54Alright, so just to be clear here, VMware has actually been bought by Broadcom, and since this has happened, well some people who complain that downloading VMware can be a little bit cumbersome, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that, but nevertheless what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through how you can effectively still get VMware, OK? Or at least this will be the process when I'm recording, I can't guarantee that in a year's time that it's going to be different, but fingers crossed that it's going to be OK. Alright, so what I'm going to do is go to the Download Now button right here, so let's just click here as so, and what it's going to do is it's going to take me to the Broadcom website, this is the redirection I was talking about, so just give this a moment, and what we can see here is where we have a login page, OK? So let's just zoom in a little touch. Now first thing is first, if you have a Broadcom account, you can just go and log in. If you do not have an account, well you're going to have to go and create one. So if you just go and search for create Broadcom account, what we can do is just go to this link here to register, and pretty much all we're going to do here is to walk through a simple registration process, so pretty much typing your email address, and we're going to have to enter in the capture form right here, and all I've done now is they've sent me a verification email. Alright, so all I've done is went to my email account, I'm going to paste in the numbers that they sent me here, OK? So let's just go and verify,

2:09and what I'm going to have to do now is to fill in some registration details, so let's type in my name, select my country, you can go and select a job title, then type in a password and just accept the conditions here, and then we can create the account. Alright, so we have successfully registered , and for now what I'll do is just say I'll do it later, so in this stage here, if we go back here , let me type in my email account. Now it says here that permission has been denied, this is part of the annoying stage since the Broadcom acquisition, so what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to unlock the account, so you'll notice here that upon first login, you'll see a message saying your account is locked to unlock the account, follow all of the stuff you're documenting, OK ? So let's click this here, and what we can actually see here is the resolution that we have to go through, OK?

2:52We just do them in a little bit, so we're going to have to go to the support portal and then click login in the upper right corner, so let's go up here, login, type in the password, alrighty-oh, so after all that nonsense, it appears that we have logged in, OK? So what I'm going to do now is go to my downloads, and what we're going to see here is no data is found , but we have this option here for free software downloads available here, OK? So what I'm going to do here is choose this here, click this, now this stage here I should be able to go and search for VMware, OK? So let's just show results, now here is the software right here, OK? So depending on what you happen to be using, the i.e. the computer you have, the software that you want is going to be a little bit different, because it happened to be in a Mac, I want to download a VMware Fusion which is their MacBook implementation, OK? Whereas if you happen to have a Windows machine or a Linux machine, you can choose VMware Workstation Pro, OK? So depending on which one you have, choose the correct one, OK? So I'm going to go to VMware Fusion, now this stage here, the version, as I record, this is going to be VMware Fusion 13, let's click this right here, and I'll just choose the latest release, OK? So let's click this, if I try to download this, again, I'm going to have a little bit of an issue, look at this, can't do it, can't do it, what's going on, well, first thing we're going to have to do is to agree to the terms and conditions, now what you'll notice is, is if you try to click this, seems like you can't click it, you have to make sure you

4:11click this link right here, terms and conditions, now you should redo this, OK? So we're going to go and redo this, of course, and once you've done that, now that you've clicked this, now you can actually tick this box, but make sure you actually click this link first, OK? Now at this stage here, we can go and choose to download, but again, you're going to see something else, it's leaning as required, more hoops to jump through, so fun, fun, fun, let's just download this, and it says you're probably to download, and this, additional verification is required till it's proceed, OK? So what I'm going to have to do here, is to type in information related to who I am, pretty much my name, my address, my postcode, all of that stuff, and then once I've done that, I'm going to choose submit, so I'm going to go through this, I'll blossom it out, and then once I'm done, I will go and submit this, OK? Alrighty, so with that, now done, what I will do is choose submit, OK, so here we go, now what I should be able to do is to go and download this, so click here, the download should begin, let's just save this as so, and hey, we're now beginning to get VMware downloaded, OK? So I know it's quite a bit of, well, it's quite difficult to be honest, but hopefully at home you were able to get this up and running, assuming that they haven't changed anything of course, and they'll have access to this really good virtualisation software. Alright, so now the download should be complete, let's go up here, and let me just click this, so I'm going to do it to double click,

5:27to install Fusion, and I'll choose to open it, type in my password to confirm, so now we have VMware up and running, what we're going to do now is to get a copy of Rhetat Enterprise Linux,

0:00Alright, so now we have our virtualization software installed. What we now want to do is we want to download Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is going to be the operating system that you're going to be using in the actual exam itself. Now, in order to get RHEL or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you're going to have to go and register for an account. So with that done, let's go to Google again. So what I've done here is just search for Red Hat Developer and let's just click this top link right here. Okie dokie. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to choose to log in.

0:31Now, and again, just let me zoom in a little touch. Alright, so really quite similar to what we talked about in the previous video with respect to VMware. We're going to have to either create an account with Red Hat or log in if you already have an account. So in my case, I already have an account. But if I didn't, all I would do would be to choose create or rather register a Red Hat account like so. Now, in this case here, they're going to ask you a whole bunch of information. We're going to specify what your login ID is going to be. So just type in some login username. Notice it's going to have to be at least five characters. And we can just then set a password that's going to satisfy the requirements of being 14 characters, so on and so forth.

1:06And now we're going to have to do all the personal information stuff. Your name, your email address, what your job happens to be. Then go and give them some contact information. And then you have to effectively go and specify that you're going to agree to the terms and then create that account. Now, in my case here, I already have an account with Red Hat, so I'm not going to go and create another one. So with that done, what I can then do is just go back and try to log in with that particular credential. Okay, so once again, we just go back to our link. And now you should have an account. So all I will do here is go up to login, click you at the very top right.

1:38All right, so at this stage here, what I'm going to do is to just go and choose my login. And then all I will do is type in the password that I used when I created this account, okay? All right, so now on the Red Hat developer website, now that I've logged in, I'm going to go and click on Red Hat product download. Let's click this here. And if I just scroll on down, we're going to see we have this option for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Let's click this. And what it says here is we can click download RHEL at no cost. Seems straightforward. However, just to be clear here, depending on the type of device you're using, you may have to download it using more ways to try.

2:11Now, if you happen to have an Intel processor, that is if you're on a Linux machine or a Windows machine, you can just go and click download RHEL at no cost. In my case, though, because I have an M1 MacBook, which uses particular silicon from Apple, I'm going to have to choose more ways to try, okay? All right, so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to get down to the RHEL server ISO. Now, again, if you happen to have a Windows machine, you can just choose the x8464. In my case, though, I need to have the ARM64 option, okay? So this is the one I'm going to download.

2:42So let's just download the ISO here. Hey, friends, this is John from the future. Now, I know in the video that I just downloaded RHEL 10, but what I'm going to recommend to you is that you actually get RHEL 9. Let me tell you why. Now, let me explain. When recording this video, the latest version, of course, was RHEL number 10. So naturally, that is the one that I happened to install. Now, let me be clear here. For the vast majority of circumstances, this is completely irrelevant whether you choose RHEL 10 or choose RHEL 9. Basically, for almost everything that we do, so long as we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux in some form and Ansible installed on that system, then everything is going to be the same, same.

3:21However, there is a slight little wrinkle, and it is because of this that I am intervening right now and just giving you a heads up because it's going to make your life a little bit easier if you just go and install this version. So let me tell you exactly where I'm going with this. So later on, almost at the very end of this course, we're going to be dealing with Ansible Automation Platform. See this thing right here? And the version that we're going to be using, at least at this time of recording, is going to be version 2.3. Now, the problem is, is if you happen to install RHEL 10, when you go to install the Automation Platform 2.3, the option is not going to be there.

3:58The only one you're going to be able to install is version 2.6. Now, automatically, this would not be a big deal because, you know, things do update, things do change. But the big thing is, is that in version 2.6, the graphical user interface is quite radically different from the one we have to understand. So it's for that reason that if you just pause right now, get RHEL 9, follow the rest of the course as per usual, when it comes to the point of installing the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, you will be able to get access to the relevant version without having to go through and build an entirely new RHEL 9 virtual machine all over again.

4:33So pretty much, just to save yourself the installation of an additional virtual machine later down the line, just go ahead and download either the x86-64 version of RHEL 9.6, or if you happen to have the ARM architecture, the 9.6 for ARM64 here, okay? And that's it. From that point on, just copy everything the same way as you see in the video. Alright, so all I did was pause the video, now RHEL has downloaded. Alright, so all I'm going to do is I'm going to take the actual image that I downloaded, I'm going to drop it on to this portion right here.

5:04And at this stage, all I'll do is just choose continue. Now all I'm going to do is specify the operating system that I have here, so in my case here, I'll say Red Hat Enterprise Linux, although I know it does say 9, that should be okay if I just choose this, even though I do have RHEL 10, if I just choose continue. What we can see here are the basic default settings. Now in my case here, I'm going to choose customize settings. And let me just give the machine a name, let's just say RHEL, call it anything you so wish. Now in my case here, I'm going to go to the network adapter, and I want to make sure that I'm using bridged networking. So I'll put it on my Wi-Fi network, which will give it this particular IP address.

5:37And all I will then do is if I so wish, I can give the machine more, well, more resources, should I say, and go and increase the memory from 2GB up to say, for example, let's say 4GB or 8GB, whatever you can spare. In my case here, I'll just give it, let's just say 4GB, okay, that should be plenty. And if you so wish, you can choose to increase the CPU, but in my case here, that's going to be fine, okay. Alrighty, oh, so that should be pretty much all good. If I now go back and just choose to play the actual machine. And all I'm going to do is go up and say install Red Hat Enterprise Linux and hit enter. So in my case here, I have English language, I am in the UK.

6:08So in my case, I'll choose this, and then I'll choose continue, but choose whatever one suits your needs best, okay. Now in my case here, I'm going to go to the installation destination first. And all I want to do is to make sure that this here, I want to make sure it's actually ticked, okay. So like this, and then I'll choose done. Okay, that's my 20GB drive that I'm going to be installing into. The next thing I will do is I'll go to the network and host name. Now all I want to do here is to make sure that the Ethernet connection is indeed set on. So make sure it's not at this, make sure we do have the blue here, okay.

6:39And then I can choose done. After that, I'm going to go to the software selection. The one I'm going to choose is server with the graphical user interface. Then I will choose done. Let's go down to the root password right here, root account. And let's just enable the root account since it is a lab environment. Let's just give it the password of password1, which is definitely not a good password to have. Let's just look at it right here, okay, as so. And again, just confirm it. Okay, let's just choose done. And again. Now the next thing I will do is go to user creation. Let's create a username. And let's just type in the name of learner here, okay.

7:10And to keep things as simple as possible, I'll add the admin privileges to this particular account. Then I'll give it a password. And again, to keep it super simple, I'll just say password1. So once again, this is not the best practice for real world, but it's just for our lab environment to keep things as easy as possible. And with this done, I will now say done. And click it again. Okay, so with this now done, what I will do is choose begin installation. And what we're going to begin doing is building our virtual machine. So again, I'll just give it some time. And for the moment, I'll pause the video and come back. All right, friends, so the installation has completed. Let's go and reboot the system and see how we get on.

7:41All right, so it begins reloading. Okay, so now we can go and log in. So let me just fullscreen this for a moment. And all I'll do is type in password1, which is the user account that I created. And hit enter. And as you can see here, it's giving us an option to take a tour. In our case here, we're going to decline the very kind offer and just choose skip. All right, so all I'm going to do is go up to the top left-hand corner, click on this right here. And then I'm going to go and click this icon for the terminal, okay? All right, so let's go and try to register the system with Red Hat then, since I'm using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So I'll say sudo subscription-manager register.

8:12I'm going to have to type in my password of password1 to use the sudo command. Now, at this stage here, I'm going to try to register my system. So I'll say my username is ipv0. And then I'll type in my password, okay? Now, remember, this is not the password of password1 for this machine. This is my password with Red Hat itself. So remember, on Red Hat Developer, we created an account. This is what I'm talking about here, okay? So hit enter, give it a moment. And as we can see here, it says the system has been registered with a particular ID. All right, the next thing I will do is I'll say sudo dnf. And I'm going to say a repo list to check the repositories that I have available.

8:45Okay, so I have my Red Hat repos because I registered. What I'll now say is sudo dnf. And I'm going to say install ansible-core and hit enter. So let's give this a moment to go and download. Okay, here we go. So I'll say yes and hit enter. And it appears we have some type of error. Let me just go and fix this. All right, so let's try this again. Hit yes and hit enter. Let's say why and hit enter again and again. And the last thing I will do just for my own edification is to do sudo hostnamectl.

9:15And I'll set the hostname. And I'll just call it ansible, okay? So you'll notice if I happen to exit out and I open up the terminal once again, go up here, click on this. Now it's just going to say learner at ansible. Again, not necessary for ansible to run. But just when I log into this machine, I like to know that this machine is what I'm using for ansible.

0:00Alright friends, so previously what we did was we installed VMware. This would effectively allow us to install particular operating systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is what we did. We created a RHEL VM. So pretty much this here, this RHEL environment, this is going to act as our automation station. However, we actually need somewhere whereby we can talk to networking devices. Now, this is where things might get a little bit confusing, but I'm going to try my best to explain what is going on. Okay, so here is VMware. Okay, so inside of VMware, what we have is Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a virtual machine. And what I'm also going to do is install some other type of virtualization software whereby we can run networking labs. So let's just for the moment call this Network OS. So pretty much we have two different virtual machines, but ultimately they're going to be able to talk to each other. Alright, so people who are on Mac, here's the bad news. And for people who are on Windows machines or Linux machines, this is where you get to laugh at us and cackle. So these networking devices, we're going to have to build them utilizing particular networking images. Now, just as it happens, these networking images, at least at the moment of this recording, they are not available on Apple Silicon. Or rather, should I say not available, I should say they

1:17do not operate, they don't function correctly on Apple Silicon. So what we have here is a problem. Now, there is one kind of workaround that's a little bit limited that I'll tell you about later on in this video. But for the moment, if you want to build your own lab and you happen to have a MacBook, well, unfortunately we're going to have to, we're going to have to use some other solutions. So let me tell you how I am handling it myself. Right, so the computer you're looking at here, this is my MacBook, okay, because this is the computer that I record on when I do all my screen recordings.

1:47So pretty much what I have is VMware installed on the Mac, as you just saw, and inside of here I've got Red Hat Enterprise Linux, no surprise there. Now, because the networking labs won't actually run on my MacBook, what I actually have is a separate computer entirely. I've also got a Windows machine and I've basically done the same type of thing. I've got VMware installed on my Windows machine and it's on the Windows machine whereby I'm actually going to install my networking emulator whereby I can run the networking labs. Yep, I know, it's unfortunate, it's a bit of a pain, but there's nothing I can actually do about that. So this really is, the main workaround is to have a different machine entirely, either a Linux laptop or a Windows machine or a dedicated ESXi server, that type of thing, and there you can install the network emulation software. Now, just in the event, because I know not everyone has the money to go and buy a separate device to run a Windows machine, that type of thing, so long as you actually have RHEL installed, we will be able to do some basic automation by using things such as the Cisco DevNet sandbox, okay, so this is going to give you some limited access to devices, but it isn't optimal for practicing for the actual examination itself, so really if you can, if you can somehow get away to getting this emulation software running on your machine, then that's going to be the best bet going forward, but like I say, it's not going to be completely limiting if you

3:04can't get it, there are some limited workarounds. So with that said, with that caveat out the road, what I'm going to do is to walk through the installation of the emulation software. Now, you can use different things, you can use things such as GNS3. Cisco happen to have a software known as CMLP, which is very, very good, but the one that is my preference is something known as EVE-NG. Now, if you happen to have familiarity with Networking Labs, perhaps you have used one of these types of emulation softwares before. Pick whatever software that you happen to prefer.

3:34So if you search for Cisco CMLP, let's click this link right here. Alright, so the next thing you're going to have to do is, in order to legally get these Cisco images, you're going to have to buy a license, that is just the way things are, so you're going to have to go and add this to your cart. Now, in my case, I already have an active license with Cisco Modeling Lab, so once you do this, you're going to get access to the images, and it's these images that we're going to be using within our EVE-NG topologies. Once again though, I appreciate this is quite a lot of money, so it's not easy for everyone just to go and freely buy this. We still have a limited but workable workaround using the DevNet sandbox, and we'll talk more about that later.

4:11All I'm saying here is that this is the best option for maximum flexibility if you can make it happen. Alright, so now what I want to do is to download something known as FileZilla. This is going to be an FTP client that's going to allow me to transfer my Cisco images that I've downloaded from my CMLP license, and it's going to allow me to transfer them from my actual machine over into my EVE-NG virtual machine, okay? This is what we want. So depending on the platform that you have, you want to install whatever FileZilla suits you. So for example, if you happen to have a Windows machine set for FileZilla Windows, click this link right here, and you can download FileZilla for that particular platform. If you happen to have, say for example, MacBook, you can just search for Mac. Here is the one here for the Intel processor, if you've got an older MacBook. Whereas if you happen to have a newer MacBook with the Apple Silicon, you can search for that, and if we click this here, then again this would be the Apple Silicon version. So let's just click this to download.

5:06In my case here, I want to have the free version, and I'll just save this as so. And if you just open this file, once you have downloaded it, pretty much this is the option right here, okay? Alright, so now I have FileZilla, which is going to allow me to transfer the actual image. In this case here, this is the Cisco image that I'm going to be transferring into my EVE-NG machine. The problem is though, is I can't really demonstrate the installation of EVE-NG because it's on a different machine entirely, not on my recording device. Nevertheless, fear not, I will show you exactly where to find the information as to how to install the EVE-NG machine, and then we'll pick up from there, okay? So what you want to do to get EVE-NG installed is to, well, first go, if I just get my browser up, just search for EVE-NG, if you click this link right here.

5:47What you're going to do is go to the downloads here, and you'll notice there is a professional edition, this is the one that you have to pay for. In my case here, we would want to get the community edition, so pretty much if you just go and download the community. From this point on, what you would want to do is to look at the documentation, okay? So see this here, the community cookbook, this is going to tell you all the instructions you need to actually get the installation up and running, okay? So as you can see here within the cookbook, it's got all the information that you need to get the VM up and running, okay? So pretty much that's what you're going to have to do in the meantime. Now in my case here, I can actually log into my EVE-NG machine by just typing ssh and the login name will be root, and the IP address of my EVE-NG machine is going to be 192.168.1.102, and once I do this, I just type in the word EVE, so E-V-E to log in, that's the password, and now I have effectively logged in to the EVE-NG machine, okay?

6:37Now if you're wondering how I knew the IP address of my machine, don't worry, when you happen to create your machine as per the instructions, it's actually going to tell you on the screen of the VM itself, okay? So you will have your own IP address. Like I say, all of this is very clearly explained in the documentation that I just showed you. Alright, so here's the thing, I've now logged into my EVE-NG machine, I have FileZilla, so what I want to do is I want to also connect my FileZilla application to the EVE-NG machine so I can transfer over those images. So let me just go to FileZilla again, let me just zoom in a little bit so you can see it a bit better.

7:09So what I'm going to do here in the host, I'm going to type in the IP address of the machine, which is 192.168.1.102, the username, like I say, is going to be root, the password will be EVE, just the word EVE, and I'll say I want to connect on port 22, and I'll just say quick connect, okay? I'm going to allow this connection, and it's pretty much the same, we'll get an unknown host key, let's just go down and just say okay to accept, and essentially what I've got here is on the left hand side, this part here, this is my local machine, this is the file system here, and on the right hand side, this here is all the stuff in the EVE-NG machine. So all I've done is went back to the EVE-NG website, if I go to documentation here, and then I'll go to how to create images, okay? Now what it's going to do here, it's going to show you how you actually create the images for all of these different vendors. Now in my case here, the type of device I'm going to be installing is this one here, the CSR-1000V, the reason being is that this is running Cisco iOS XE, and this is going to be featured prominently within the exam itself, okay? So this is a good one to actually have installed, however, what I will say is that it can be a little bit intensive in terms of resources. Another option you can use, which is pretty much going to be really quite similar, are these ones right here, the Cisco vIOS from CML, okay? But like I say, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to this one right here, okay? So let's click this, so pretty much all I'm going to do is issue these particular commands, I'm

8:26going to copy these, okay? I'll go back to my SSH session, okay? So I've pasted these commands in, all it's done is created a random folder called ABC, and I've changed into that folder, and what I now want to do is I want to effectively transfer the image on my machine into the folder using FileZilla, okay? So if I go back to FileZilla, all I'm going to do here is to refresh this, okay? So we're now going to see the new folder that's just been created, let's just go inside of here, as we can see it. Now I want to go and navigate to where my images are stored, now I've just happened to put it on my desktop, this is directly from my CMLP license, and all I'm going to do is click this image, I'm going to drag it into this ABC folder, okay?

9:02That's going to transfer and take a little bit of time, once it's done, it's now going to be available inside that particular directory. All right, so the transfer has now completed, let's go to the next stage then, okay? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to my terminal window, all right, so here is the image in this folder, the first thing I'm going to do is to rename this image, I'm going to say nv to move it, then I'm just going to specify the name of the image that I have here, now your image name might be a little bit different, don't worry about that, one thing you do want to make sure though is you do rename it this very particular name, okay? So see this here, virtuoa.qcow2, that's what you want to call it, so if I hit enter, do a listing of the directory, now we can see the file has been renamed. At this stage here, what I want to do is I want to create a new directory and move this file into this very particular directory structure. So if we go back to the documentation, just skip down to step number eight down here, okay? All I'm going to do is just copy this particular command right here, so all I'll do is just paste in this command, like so, and what I now want to do is to move this particular file here into this file path, so again let's just copy the path, okay? Now this stage here, what I want to do is I want to go back and just issue this particular command to fix the permissions, okay?

10:14Let's just copy you and just paste this in, if I hit enter, give it a moment to complete. Now like I say, I want to go to the IP address of the EVE-NG machine, which is going to be this IP address right here, 192.168.1.102 So let's copy this and go to my browser, okay? Paste it in, hit enter, now what I'm going to do is log in with the word admin and then type the word EVE, these are the default credentials, and choose sign in. Now here I will right click, choose node, then search for Cisco. We're going to see we have our CSR device and all I'll do is just choose save and at this stage here I can right click and start the device.

10:48Now it should take a few minutes, maybe five minutes to fully load up, just be patient and what I'll do is pause the video and come back. Alright, so I paused the video for around five minutes, what I'm now going to do is to double click this device here and try to open a terminal, okay? So let's hit enter and as we can see here the device is now running, just say N and enter again and now as we can see here we've got access to our networking device. Alright friends, so I know that was a lot to get to but we're kind of at the end point here, okay? So it's good news from this point on, okay? So if you search for DevNet Sandbox and click this link right here, what you're going to have to do is to, and let me just zoom in a little touch, you're going to have to go and create an account, so you can sign up for free and that's going to allow you access to these sandboxes. Alright, so all I've done is log in, if I choose launch sandbox, what you can do is search for particular devices such as in this case here, Cisco iOS XE. Now this particular box is reservable, so what you're going to have to do is to book out particular time so that you can access these devices. However, if you want to use, say for example, Cisco iOS XR, this is an always on sandbox, meaning that it's accessible to everyone all the time, this is also an option for you.

11:53So in my case here, if I just click this one here, the XR, if I go down here, you're going to see the login details, so here it is here, let's just copy this. You can see the username is admin and the password is c1seo12345. So if I just say ssh admin, which is the username, and paste in that address that we just saw, this is just over the internet, if I just say yes to accept the fingerprint and I type in the password of c1seo12345, as you can see here, we actually do have access to a Cisco device, but it's only one device, okay, we don't actually have a full topology, so it's a little bit limited, but in the case that you can't get these Cisco images, or you can't get EVE-NG up and running, this is still an option for you, okay, so don't despair, we still have other solutions to solve the problem.

0:00Alright friends, so here we are, we have Eveng up and running. What I'm going to do is to add one of my devices that I've just created. So it starts for Cisco and hit enter and just choose save. Now, just for the moment, what I want to do is I want to test the connection between my rail device into the Eveng topology. Now the way we connect the devices inside the Eveng to external things is we can effectively go and create a new network. And the network type is going to be the management cloud zero.

0:30So if I choose save here, all I'm going to do is connect this into one of the interfaces of the device itself. Let's choose gigabit one. And at this stage here, I'm going to turn on the device and wait a few minutes for the device to boot. Alright, so now the device has booters, let's go on and take a figure terminal. And what I will do is give the device a name, so I'll say host name. And let's just call this one device number one. Okay. Then the next thing I will do is I'm going to say username and I'll create a username of let's just say learner. I'll give this a privilege of let's say 15. And I'm going to say the password is going to be in just get the password quite simple as password one so we're not forgetting anything.

1:03Alright, so the first thing I'm going to do is type the commands a new model and then a authentication log in default local. And then I'll say authorization exact default local. And then I'm going to have to create a domain name so SSH will operate or just call this example dot local keep it nice and simple. Alright, so here's the thing you see this device here or this device. This interface in this device gigabit one. I'm going to use this explicitly to manage this device. It's going to be used for Ansible to connect into the device. It's not going to be used for the regular traffic of the device.

1:36So because of this, I'm going to put this into its own VRF. This is how we separate this logically. So what I'm going to do here is say VRF definition and create a VRF just called management. I'm going to say this is going to be for IPv4 and I can exit back out. Now I can go into that particular interface and I'll put the interface into that VRF by saying VRF forwarding and specifying the name of the VRF which is management. Now at this stage here, I'm going to give this interface an IP address. I'm going to put it in the same network range as my regular system.

2:07So basically in the same network range as my rail system. So let's just give this the address of 192.168.1. Well, let's just say 151.0. As long as it's in the network range of 192.168.1.0, that's all I care about for the moment. I'll give it a slash 24 mask and then say no shots. Now at this stage here, I'm going to say crypto key and I want to generate an RS key with a modulus of 2048. So let's do that. Kelt's going to my VT wire lines. I'll say zero all the way to 530. And I'll say transport input SSH.

2:38And I'll say login authentication default. Alright, so over on my Ansible machine, what I should be able to do is to ping that particular device. So I'll try to ping 1.151. And as we can see here, we have the connection. However, depending on how old your device is happened to be, you might have an issue trying to connect them over SSH. Let me show you what I mean. If I say SSH and type in learner and then do the IP address of 1.151. If I hit enter, same here that we've got no matching host key type found. So all I'm going to do here is to configure my system to allow for some old encryption stuff.

3:11Okay. So the way we do this is I say pseudo nano and I say exit and then SSH and then SSH underscore config. Now let me just type in my password of password 1. And at this stage here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste in this particular piece of configuration right here. Okay. Now I'm going to attach this into the scale itself. So you can just copy in the exact same stuff. Once you've done this, I want you to press control or hold down control press O . That's going to allow to write the file. I'll then press enter. Then I'll hold down control and then press X and that'll escape back out.

3:43Now at this stage here, I'm just going to type the command pseudo update crypto policies and I'll say dash dash and I'll say set legacy. Okay. Now once it's done, I'm going to say reboot and let the system reboot for a moment. All right. So let's log back in. Okay. Let's add up and try the same connection one more time. I'll then say yes to accept the fingerprints and I'll type in the password of password 1 and to enter. And as we can see here, I now have the connection from my rail machine into my Cisco device, meaning that Ansible will also be able to use this SSH connection to log in and manage the device using automation.

0:00Alright friends, so the final component is we're going to go and install an IDE . This is pretty much an environment we can use to write our Ansible Playbooks. Now to be clear here, you absolutely do not have to download an IDE. You could, if you so wish, just use General Text Editors, but in terms of the spacing in terms of the visualization, it can make things much, much easier if you use these IDEs because that's what they're built for. Okay, it's just meant to make writing code, writing things like Playbooks, it's meant to make it easier, so why not take advantage of that, okay?

0:31So there's two options that we have here. We can install it directly on to the Rail system right here. So I've got this Rail VM, as you can see right here, I can install it on there. Or what I could also do is I could just install it on my regular host machine. So my host machine is just a MacBook. And what I could do is install the IDE on here locally and just connect it and attach it to this particular VM. So the answer to which way it's fine, my own preference is I like to install it locally and then attach it to the VM.

1:03But I appreciate the amount of everyone wants to do it that way. So I'll show you the easiest way to get it done and that is to just install it directly on to Rail itself. So with that said, let's go and do it then. So if you go to Rail and you're searching for Firefox, let's open this up. Okay, so let's go to Google. So all I'm going to do is search for VS Code Download. This is a product developed by Microsoft, but you can use it on all different platforms. Super super popular. So let's go in here. All right, so here's the thing. If we're going to be downloading it directly on to Rail, we're going to have to specify the Linux downloads.

1:35And because we have Red Hat, we want to install the RPM version. Whilst we are installing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this is ultimately a VM on a host machine. Now my host machine, like I said, it's a MacBook. I'm going to have to make sure I get the ARM 64 version. If your underlying host machine is a Windows machine or a Linux machine, then you want to get the X64 version. So my case here, I'm choosing ARM 64 and that's what I'm going to download. Okay. So now we can see the download has begun. Okay, so we just click this download. Now that it's finished, give it a moment.

2:07And all we're going to do is to click install and then type in my password of password one. Okay, then we'll choose to authenticate and now the install is beginning. And as we can see here, I can just open the application. So now here we are. So let me just close this for a moment. So here's the thing. If I want to go and create a new file, I can just go up here and say new text file. And pretty much what we've got here is the ID. So I can begin typing stuff and just say this is just some example of some text . And I can go to file and then save this so I can choose where the boat I want to save it. Let's go into documents and let's just give it a name of my example dot txt and save this okay.

2:43So now it's been saved. If I want to go into the terminal, what I can do is say terminal and say new terminal. And down here, pretty much what we see here is well, it's a command line of our system. So I can do a listing. I can go into the documents folder. If I do a listing again, we're going to see the text file that we just created. And I can open it as so by typing the cat command and we can see here we have used VS code to create new files on our system. Now, obviously this is just a simple text file, but not really getting many benefits of it right now. But when it comes to writing Ansible Playbooks where indentation is important, so on and so forth, this is going to make things much, much easier for us to learn.

3:19All right, so that is us pretty much up and running on the actual rail system itself. The alternative solution, like I said, is if I just go back here, let me just minimize my virtual machine. So what I can also do is just directly download it onto my host machine. So this is me and my Mac book just do the same type of thing sets for visual studio codes. In this case, though, we're going to choose a Mac and it's going to be Apple Silicon in this case here. So let's just choose this one right here and then we can save it and just give it a moment to download. And of course, if you're doing this on a Windows machine, it might look a little bit different, but the process is generally the same.

3:52All right, so here we go. Let's try to open up and VS code is beginning to open. Now you might notice that mine here looks a little bit different on my system. That is because my Mac book is remembering old system settings from previous installations. So don't worry about that. What we do want to get though is to get a particular extension to allow us to connect into the rail system. So what I want to do is to go into the settings and then go into the extensions here and the extension that I want to search for is something known as remote SSH. So this one right here. So what I want to do here is choose to install it and effectively this is going to allow me to log in over SSH into my rail system.

4:28So I'm now going to do is attempt to connect to this device by going to the remote explorer. Now you can see here my system remembers these old connections to all devices. Don't worry about that at all. What I'm going to do is to establish a brand new connection. So over here SSH, I'm going to go and add a new connection and I'm just going to say SSH learner at and I'll type in IP address of 192.168.1.136 and to enter and then I'll hit enter again. And at this stage here I'm going to right click it and then say connect in a new window. So now what it's doing is it's offering me the fingerprint.

4:59If I say continue, what I'm now going to do is have to type in the password which is password one and to enter and now we can see here it's downloading the VS code server on to the rail system itself. And what I can do is close the first window and leave this one open on my MacBook. So what I can now do is go up to terminal and ask for a new terminal. And what you're going to notice here is that on the right hand side we're actually connected into the, well the right hat system as we can see LS. If I do CD documents LS, there is that fail that we created directly on the system itself.

5:30So pretty much either of these solutions is going to be absolutely fine. Pretty much either which way it's going to give us IDE access on the rail system which is going to make writing Ansible Playbooks much much easier.