Documentation

2. Tower Licensing, Updates, and Support

Ansible Tower by Red Hat (“Ansible Tower”) is a proprietary software product provided via an annual subscription entered into between you and Red Hat, Inc. (“Red Hat”).

Ansible is an open source software project and is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3, as detailed in the Ansible source code: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/COPYING

2.1. Support

Red Hat offers support for paid Enterprise: Standard and Enterprise: Premium Subscription customers seeking help with the Ansible Tower product.

If you or your company has paid for Ansible Tower, you can contact the support team at https://access.redhat.com. To better understand the levels of support which match your Ansible Tower Subscription, refer to Subscription Types.

If you are experiencing Ansible software issues, you should reach out to the “ansible-devel” mailing list or file an issue on the Github project page at https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/.

All of Ansible’s community and OSS info can be found here: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/community.html

2.1.1. Ansible Playbook Support

For customers with a paid Enterprise: Standard or Enterprise: Premium Ansible Tower Subscription, Red Hat offers Ansible Playbook support [1]. Playbook support consists of support for:

  • Runtime execution problems for Playbooks run via Tower
  • Assistance with Playbook errors and tracebacks
  • Limited best practice guidance in Ansible use from the Ansible Experts

Playbook support does not consist of:

  • Enhancements and fixes for Ansible modules and the Ansible engine
  • Assistance with the creation of Playbooks from anew
  • Long-term maintenance of a specific Ansible or Ansible Tower version

Notes:

[1]Playbook support is available for customers using the current or previous minor release of Ansible. For example, if the current version of Ansible is 2.2, Red Hat provides Ansible Playbook support for versions 2.2 and 2.1. In the event an Ansible Playbook workaround is not available, and an Ansible software correction is required, a version update will be required.

2.2. Trial / Evaluation

While a license is required for Ansible Tower to run, there is no fee for managing up to 10 hosts. Additionally, trial licenses are available for exploring Ansible Tower with a larger number of hosts.

2.3. Subscription Types

Ansible Tower is provided at various levels of support and number of machines as an annual Subscription.

All Subscription levels include regular updates and releases of Ansible Tower.

For more information, contact Ansible via the Red Hat Customer portal at https://access.redhat.com/ or at http://www.ansible.com/pricing/.

2.4. Node Counting in Licenses

The Tower license defines the number of Managed Nodes that can be managed by Ansible Tower. A typical license will say ‘License Count: 500’, which sets the maximum number of Managed Nodes at 500.

Ansible Tower counts Managed Nodes by the number of hosts in inventory. If more Managed Nodes are in the Ansible Tower inventory than are supported by the license, you will be unable to start any Jobs in Ansible Tower. If a dynamic inventory sync causes Ansible Tower to exceed the Managed Node count specified in the license, the dynamic inventory sync will fail.

If you have multiple hosts in inventory that have the same name, such as “webserver1”, they will be counted for licensing purposes as a single node. Note that this differs from the ‘Hosts’ count in Tower’s dashboard, which counts hosts in separate inventories separately.

2.5. License Features

The following list of features are available for all new Enterprise: Standard or Enterprise: Premium Subscriptions:

  • Workflows (added in |at| 3.1.0)
  • Clustering in Tower (added in |at| 3.1.0)
  • Custom re-branding for login (added in Ansible Tower 2.4.0)
  • SAML and RADIUS Authentication Support (added in Ansible Tower 2.4.0)
  • Multi-Organization Support
  • Activity Streams
  • Surveys
  • LDAP Support
  • Active/Passive Redundancy
  • System Tracking (added in Ansible Tower 2.2.0)

Enterprise: Standard or Enterprise: Premium license users with versions of Ansible Tower prior to 2.2 must import a new license file to enable System Tracking.

2.6. Tower Component Licenses

To view the license information for the components included within Ansible Tower, refer to /usr/share/doc/ansible-tower-<version>/README where <version> refers to the version of Ansible Tower you have installed.

To view a specific license, refer to /usr/share/doc/ansible-tower-<version>/*.txt, where * is replaced by the license file name to which you are referring.