1. Preparing for the Tower Installation¶

This guide helps you get your Ansible Tower installation up and running as quickly as possible.

At the end of the installation, using your web browser, you can access and fully utilize Tower.

1.1. Installation and Reference guide¶

While this guide covers the basics, you may find that you need the more detailed information available in the Installation and Reference Guide.

You should also review the General Installation Notes before starting the installation.

1.2. Prerequisites and Requirements¶

For platform information, refer to Supported Platforms and Requirements and Platform Specific Notes in the Ansible Tower Installation and Reference Guide.

Ansible Tower has the following requirements:

Note

Tower is a full application and the installation process installs several dependencies such as PostgreSQL, Django, Apache, and others. It is required that you install Tower on a standalone VM or cloud instance and do not co-locate any other applications on that machine (beyond possible monitoring or logging software). Although Tower and Ansible are written in Python, they are not just simple Python libraries. Therefore Tower cannot be installed in a Python virtualenv, a Docker container, or any similar subsystem; you must install it as described in the installation instructions in this guide.

Supported Operating Systems:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 64-bit
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 64-bit
- CentOS 6 64-bit
- CentOS 7 64-bit
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit
- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit
An HTML5 compliant web browser
2 GB RAM minimum (4+ GB RAM recommended)
- 2 GB RAM (minimum and recommended for Vagrant trial installations)
- 4 GB RAM is recommended per 100 forks
20 GB hard disk
64-bit support required (kernel and runtime)
For Amazon EC2:
- Instance size of m3.medium or larger
- An instance size of m3.xlarge or larger if there are more than 100 hosts
For HA MongoDB setups:
- If you plan to run MongoDB, the following guidelines provide a rough estimate for the amount of space required. The basic calculation is:
  
  (number of hosts in inventory) * (number of scans) * (average module fact size) * (number of modules scanning)
- For example:
  
  hosts = 1,000
  
  number of scans = 365 (1 scan per day for a year)
  
  average module fact size = 100 kb
  
  number of modules = 4 (ansible, packages, services, files)
  
  = 146 GB
The default scan operation has the four (4) modules listed, but you can add your own. Depending on the kinds of modules and the size of the facts you are gathering, that size might be larger.

To help keep the size down, you can use a management job to purge old facts. Refer to Management Jobs in the Ansible Tower Administration Guide for more information

Note

While Ansible Tower depends on Ansible playbooks and requires the installation of the latest stable version of Ansible before installing Tower, manual installations of Ansible are no longer required.

Beginning with Ansible Tower version 2.3, the Tower installation program attempts to install Ansible as part of the installation process. Previously, Tower required manual installations of the Ansible software package before running the Tower installation program. Now, Tower attempts to install the latest stable Ansible package.

If performing a bundled tower installation, the installation program attempts to install Ansible (and it’s dependencies) from the bundle.

While other operating systems may technically function, currently only the above list is supported to host an Ansible Tower installation. If you have a firm requirement to run Tower on an unsupported operating system, please contact Ansible at http://support.ansible.com/. Management of other operating systems (nodes) is documented by the Ansible project itself and allows for a wider list.

Actual RAM requirements vary based on how many hosts Tower will manage simultaneously (which is controlled by the forks parameter in the job template or the system ansible.cfg file). To avoid possible resource conflicts, Ansible recommends 4 GB of memory per 100 forks. For example, if forks is set to 100, 4 GB of memory is recommended; if forks is set to 400, 16 GB of memory is recommended.

A larger number of hosts can of course be addressed, though if the fork number is less than the total host count, more passes across the hosts are required. These RAM limitations are avoided when using rolling updates or when using the provisioning callback system built into Tower, where each system requesting configuration enters a queue and is processed as quickly as possible; or in cases where Tower is producing or deploying images such as AMIs. All of these are great approaches to managing larger environments. For further questions, please contact http://support.ansible.com/.

The requirements for systems managed by Tower are the same as for Ansible at: http://docs.ansible.com/intro_getting_started.html

For convenience, summaries of those instructions are in the following sections.

1.3. Configuration and Installation for Ansible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS¶

The following steps help you configure access to the repository as well as install Ansible.

1.3.1. Configure access to the repository for Ansible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS (version 6 or later):¶

Configure the EPEL repository and any others needed.

As the root user, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and CentOS 6:

root@localhost:~$ yum install http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm

Note

For users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, you must enable the optional repository.

As the root user, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and CentOS 7

root@localhost:~$ yum install http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Note

You may also need to enable the extra repository, named extras on CentOS 7, rhel-7-server-extras-rpms on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and rhui-REGION-rhel-server-extras when running in EC2.
When using the official Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 marketplace AMI, ensure that the latest rh-amazon-rhui-client package that allows enabling the optional repository (named rhui-REGION-rhel-server-optional in EC2) is installed.

1.3.2. Install Ansible on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS (version 6 or later):¶

root@localhost:~$ yum install ansible

1.4. Configuration and Installation for Ansible with Ubuntu¶

The following steps help you configure access to the repository as well as install Ansible.

1.4.1. Configure access to the repository for Ansible with Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 14.04:¶

As the root user, configure Ansible PPA:

root@localhost:~$ apt-get install software-properties-common
root@localhost:~$ apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible

1.4.2. Install Ansible on Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 14.04:¶

root@localhost:~$ apt-get update
root@localhost:~$ apt-get install ansible

1.5. Tower Installation Scenarios¶

Tower installs in one of three scenarios and each of these scenarios are configurable through the Tower Installation Wizard:

Single Machine integrated installation
Single Machine with an external database
High Availability Multi-Machine with an external database

For more information on these installation scenarios, refer to Tower Installation Scenarios.