1. Tower Licensing, Updates, and Support¶

1.1. Support¶

Ansible offers support for paid Enterprise customers seeking help with the Tower product. If you or you company has paid for a license of Ansible Tower, you can contact Ansible via the Red Hat Customer Portal at https://access.redhat.com/. To better understand the levels of support which match your Tower license, refer to License Types.

If you are using Ansible core and are having 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

1.2. Trial Licenses¶

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

Trial licenses for Tower are available at: http://ansible.com/license

To acquire a license for additional servers, visit: http://www.ansible.com/pricing/

1.3. License Types¶

Tower is licensed at various levels as an annual subscription. Whether you have a small business or a mission-critical environment, Ansible is ready to simplify your IT work-flow.

• Self-Support

  • Manage smaller environments (up to 250 nodes)
  • Maintenance and upgrades included

• Enterprise: Standard

  • Manage any size environment
  • Enterprise 8x5 support and SLA (4 hour critical incident response)
  • Phone and web support
  • Maintenance and upgrades included

• Enterprise: Premium

  • Manage any size environment, including mission-critical environments
  • Premium 24x7 support and SLA (4 hour critical incident response, 8 hour non-critical incident response)
  • Phone and web support
  • Maintenance and upgrades included

All subscriptions include regular updates and releases of both Ansible Tower and Ansible core.

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

1.4. Node Counting in Licenses¶

The Tower license defines the number of nodes that can be managed by Tower. A typical license will say ‘Enterprise Tower Up To 250 Nodes’, which sets the maximum number of nodes that can be managed at 250.

Tower counts nodes by the number of hosts in inventory. If more nodes are in the Tower inventory than are supported by the license, you will be unable to start any Jobs in Tower. If a dynamic inventory sync will cause Tower to exceed the 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.

1.5. License Features¶

The following list of features are available for all new Enterprise or Premium license users:

• Custom rebranding 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 license users with versions of Ansible Tower prior to 2.2 must import a new license file to enable System Tracking.

1.6. Tower Component Licenses¶

Ansible Tower includes some open source components. Ansible, Inc. supports Tower’s use of and interactions with these components for both development and production purposes, subject to applicable terms and conditions. Unless otherwise agreed to in writing, the use of Ansible Tower is subject to the Ansible Software Subscription and Services Agreement located at http://www.ansible.com/subscription-agreement. Ansible Tower is a proprietary product offered by Ansible, Inc. and its use is not intended to prohibit the rights under any open source license.

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.