Documentation

2. Tower Licensing, Updates, and Support

Red Hat Ansible Tower (“Ansible Tower”) is a software product provided as part of 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 to paid Red Hat Ansible Automation customers.

If you or your company has purchased a subscription for Ansible Automation, 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. For details of what is covered under an Ansible Automation subscription, please see the Scopes of Support at: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/ansible-tower#scope-of-coverage-4 and https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/ansible-engine.

2.2. Trial / Evaluation

While a license is required for Ansible Tower to run, there is no fee for a trial license.

  • Trial licenses for Red Hat Ansible Automation are available at: http://ansible.com/license

  • Support is not included in a trial license or during an evaluation of the Tower Software.

2.3. Subscription Types

Red Hat Ansible Automation 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 nodes 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. Note that this behavior is case-sensitive; “webserver1” and “WebServer1” will be treated as different nodes.

For more information on managed node requirements for licensing, please see https://access.redhat.com/articles/3331481.

2.5. 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.