2. Upgrading to Ansible Automation Platform¶

2.1. Upgrade Planning¶

This section covers changes that you should keep in mind as you attempt to upgrade your Ansible Tower instance.

• Even if you already have a valid license from a previous version, you must still provide your credentials or a subscriptions manifest again upon upgrading to Ansible Tower 3.8. See Import a Subscription in the Ansible Tower User Guide.

• If you need to upgrade Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ansible Tower, you will need to do a backup and restore of your Tower data. Refer to Upgrading an Existing Tower Installation in the Ansible Automation Platform Installation and Reference Guide for further detail.

• Clustered upgrades require special attention to instance and instance groups prior to starting the upgrade. Refer to the Setting up the Inventory File and see Clustering for details.

• Prior versions of Ansible Tower used the variable name rabbitmq_host during installation. If you are upgrading from a previous version of Tower, and you previously specified rabbitmq_host in your inventory, simply rename rabbitmq_host to routable_hostname before upgrading. See Clustering for details.

2.2. Obtaining the Installer¶

Refer to Obtain the Ansible Automation Platform Installation Program in the Ansible Automation Platform Installation and Reference Guide for detail.

2.3. Setting up the Inventory File¶

As you edit your inventory file, there are a few things you must keep in mind:

• The contents of the inventory file should be defined in ./inventory, next to the ./setup.sh installer playbook.

• For installations and upgrades: If you need to make use of external databases, you must ensure the database sections of your inventory file are properly setup. Edit this file and add your external database information before running the setup script.

• For Ansible Automation Platform or Automation Hub: Be sure to add an automation hub host in the [automationhub] group (Tower and Automation Hub cannot be installed on the same node).

• Tower will not configure replication or failover for the database that it uses, although Tower should work with any replication that you have.

• The database server should be on the same network or in the same data center as the Tower server for performance reasons.

• For upgrading an existing cluster: When upgrading a cluster, you may decide that you want to also reconfigure your cluster to omit existing instances or instance groups. Omitting the instance or the instance group from the inventory file will not be enough to remove them from the cluster. In addition to omitting instances or instance groups from the inventory file, you must also deprovision instances or instance groups before starting the upgrade. Otherwise, omitted instances or instance groups will continue to communicate with the cluster, which can cause issues with tower services during the upgrade.

• For clustered installations: If you are creating a clustered setup, you must replace localhost with the hostname or IP address of all instances. All nodes/instances must be able to reach any others using this hostname or address. In other words, you cannot use the localhost ansible_connection=local on one of the nodes AND all of the nodes should use the same format for the host names.

  Therefore, this will not work:

  [tower]
  localhost ansible_connection=local
  hostA
  hostB.example.com
  172.27.0.4
  

  Instead, use these formats:

  [tower]
  hostA
  hostB
  hostC
  

  OR

  [tower]
  hostA.example.com
  hostB.example.com
  hostC.example.com
  

  OR

  [tower]
  172.27.0.2
  172.27.0.3
  172.27.0.4
  

• For all standard installations: When performing an installation, you must supply any necessary passwords in the inventory file.

[automationhub]
automationhub.acme.org
[all:vars]
automationhub_admin_password='<password>'
automationhub_pg_host=''
automationhub_pg_port=''
automationhub_pg_database='automationhub'
automationhub_pg_username='automationhub'
automationhub_pg_password='<password>'
automationhub_pg_sslmode='prefer'
# The default install will deploy a TLS enabled Automation Hub.
# If for some reason this is not the behavior wanted one can
# disable TLS enabled deployment.
#
# automationhub_disable_https = False
# The default install will generate self-signed certificates for the Automation
# Hub service. If you are providing valid certificate via automationhub_ssl_cert
# and automationhub_ssl_key, one should toggle that value to True.
#
# automationhub_ssl_validate_certs = False
# SSL-related variables
# If set, this will install a custom CA certificate to the system trust store.
# custom_ca_cert=/path/to/ca.crt
# Certificate and key to install in Automation Hub node
# automationhub_ssl_cert=/path/to/automationhub.cert
# automationhub_ssl_key=/path/to/automationhub.key

[tower]
tower.acme.org
[automationhub]
automationhub.acme.org
[database]
database-01.acme.org
[all:vars]
admin_password='<password>'
pg_host='database-01.acme.org'
pg_port='5432'
pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'
pg_password='<password>'
pg_sslmode='prefer'  # set to 'verify-full' for client-side enforced SSL
# Automation Hub Configuration
#
automationhub_admin_password='<password>'
automationhub_pg_host='database-01.acme.org'
automationhub_pg_port='5432'
automationhub_pg_database='automationhub'
automationhub_pg_username='automationhub'
automationhub_pg_password='<password>'
automationhub_pg_sslmode='prefer'
# The default install will deploy a TLS enabled Automation Hub.
# If for some reason this is not the behavior wanted one can
# disable TLS enabled deployment.
#
# automationhub_disable_https = False
# The default install will generate self-signed certificates for the Automation
# Hub service. If you are providing valid certificate via automationhub_ssl_cert
# and automationhub_ssl_key, one should toggle that value to True.
#
# automationhub_ssl_validate_certs = False
# Isolated Tower nodes automatically generate an RSA key for authentication;
# To disable this behavior, set this value to false
# isolated_key_generation=true
# SSL-related variables
# If set, this will install a custom CA certificate to the system trust store.
# custom_ca_cert=/path/to/ca.crt
# Certificate and key to install in nginx for the web UI and API
# web_server_ssl_cert=/path/to/tower.cert
# web_server_ssl_key=/path/to/tower.key
# Certificate and key to install in Automation Hub node
# automationhub_ssl_cert=/path/to/automationhub.cert
# automationhub_ssl_key=/path/to/automationhub.key
# Server-side SSL settings for PostgreSQL (when we are installing it).
# postgres_use_ssl=False
# postgres_ssl_cert=/path/to/pgsql.crt
# postgres_ssl_key=/path/to/pgsql.key

[tower]
localhost ansible_connection=local

[database]

[all:vars]
admin_password='password'

pg_host=''
pg_port=''

pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'
pg_password='password'

[tower]
clusternode1.example.com
clusternode2.example.com
clusternode3.example.com

[database]
dbnode.example.com

[all:vars]
ansible_become=true

admin_password='password'

pg_host='dbnode.example.com'
pg_port='5432'

pg_database='tower'
pg_username='tower'
pg_password='password'

[tower]
node.example.com ansible_connection=local

[database]

[all:vars]
admin_password='password'
pg_password='password'


pg_host='database.example.com'
pg_port='5432'

pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'

[tower]
node.example.com ansible_connection=local


[database]
database.example.com

[all:vars]
admin_password='password'
pg_password='password'

pg_host='database.example.com'
pg_port='5432'

pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'

2.4. Running the Setup Playbook¶

The Tower setup playbook script uses the inventory file and is invoked as ./setup.sh from the path where you unpacked the Tower installer tarball.

root@localhost:~$ ./setup.sh

The setup script takes the following arguments:

• -h – Show this help message and exit

• -i INVENTORY_FILE – Path to Ansible inventory file (default: inventory)

• -e EXTRA_VARS – Set additional Ansible variables as key=value or YAML/JSON (i.e. -e bundle_install=false forces an online installation)

• -b – Perform a database backup in lieu of installing

• -r – Perform a database restore in lieu of installing (a default restore path is used unless EXTRA_VARS are provided with a non-default path, as shown in the code example below)

./setup.sh -e 'restore_backup_file=/path/to/nondefault/location' -r