Infoblox Guide

You can review simple example tasks in the documentation for any of the or look at the Use cases with modules section for more elaborate examples. See the website for more information on the Infoblox product.

Note

You can retrieve most of the example playbooks used in this guide from the network-automation/infoblox_ansible GitHub repository.

Before using Ansible modules with Infoblox, you must install the infoblox-client on your Ansible control node:

Note

You need an NIOS account with the WAPI feature enabled to use Ansible with Infoblox.

To use Infoblox nios modules in playbooks, you need to configure the credentials to access your Infoblox system. The examples in this guide use credentials stored in <playbookdir>/group_vars/nios.yml. Replace these values with your Infoblox credentials:

---
nios_provider:
  host: 192.0.0.2
  username: admin
  password: ansible

Ansible includes the following lookup plugins for NIOS:

Uses the Infoblox WAPI API to fetch NIOS specified objects, for example network views, DNS views, and host records.
nios_next_ip Provides the next available IP address from a network. You’ll see an example of this in .
nios_next_network - Returns the next available network range for a network-container.

To retrieve all network views and save them in a variable, use the module with the nios lookup plugin:

---
- hosts: nios
  connection: local
  tasks:
    - name: fetch all networkview objects
      set_fact:
        networkviews: "{{ lookup('nios', 'networkview', provider=nios_provider) }}"
 
    - name: check the networkviews
      debug:
        var: networkviews

Retrieving a host record

To retrieve a set of host records, use the set_fact module with the nios lookup plugin and include a filter for the specific hosts you want to retrieve:

If you run this get_host_record.yml playbook, you should see results similar to the following:

$ ansible-playbook get_host_record.yml
 
PLAY [localhost] ***************************************************************************************
 
TASK [fetch host leaf01] ******************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
 
TASK [check the leaf01 return variable] *************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
< ...output shortened...>
    "host": {
            {
                "configure_for_dhcp": false,
                "host": "leaf01.ansible.com",
            }
        ],
        "name": "leaf01.ansible.com",
        "view": "default"
    }
}
 
TASK [debug specific variable (ipv4 address)] ******************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "host.ipv4addrs[0].ipv4addr": "192.168.1.11"
}
 
TASK [fetch host leaf02] ******************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
 
TASK [check the leaf02 return variable] *************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
< ...output shortened...>
    "host": {
        "ipv4addrs": [
            {
                "configure_for_dhcp": false,
                "host": "leaf02.example.com",
                "ipv4addr": "192.168.1.12"
            }
        ],
    }
}
 
PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=5    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0

The output above shows the host record for and leaf02.ansible.com that were retrieved by the nios lookup plugin. This playbook saves the information in variables which you can use in other playbooks. This allows you to use Infoblox as a single source of truth to gather and use information that changes dynamically. See for more information on using Ansible variables. See the nios examples for more data options that you can retrieve.

You can access these playbooks at .

You can use the nios modules in tasks to simplify common Infoblox workflows. Be sure to set up your NIOS credentials before following these examples.

To configure an IPv4 network, use the module:

---
- hosts: nios
  connection: local
  tasks:
    - name: Create a network on the default network view
      nios_network:
        network: 192.168.100.0/24
        options:
          - name: domain-name
            value: ansible.com
        state: present
        provider: "{{nios_provider}}"

Notice the last parameter, provider, uses the variable nios_provider defined in the group_vars/ directory.

Creating a host record

Notice the IPv4 address in this example uses the nios_next_ip lookup plugin to find the next available IPv4 address on the network.

To configure a forward DNS zone use, the nios_zone module:

---
- hosts: nios
  connection: local
  tasks:
    - name: Create a forward DNS zone called ansible-test.com
      nios_zone:
        name: ansible-test.com
        comment: local DNS zone
        state: present
        provider: "{{ nios_provider }}"

Creating a reverse DNS zone

To configure a reverse DNS zone:

---
- hosts: nios
  connection: local
  tasks:
    - name: configure a reverse mapping zone on the system using IPV6 zone format
      nios_zone:
        name: 100::1/128
        zone_format: IPV6
        state: present
        provider: "{{ nios_provider }}"

You can use the Infoblox dynamic inventory script to import your network node inventory with Infoblox NIOS. To gather the inventory from Infoblox, you need two files:

- A file that specifies the NIOS provider arguments and optional filters.
infoblox.py - The python script that retrieves the NIOS inventory.

To use the Infoblox dynamic inventory script:

Download the file and save it in the /etc/ansible directory.
Modify the infoblox.yaml file with your NIOS credentials.
Download the infoblox.py file and save it in the /etc/ansible/hosts directory.
Change the permissions on the infoblox.py file to make the file an executable:

You can optionally use ./infoblox.py —list to test the script. After a few minutes, you should see your Infoblox inventory in JSON format. You can explicitly use the Infoblox dynamic inventory script as follows:

$ ansible -i infoblox.py all -m ping

You can also implicitly use the Infoblox dynamic inventory script by including it in your inventory directory (etc/ansible/hosts by default). See for more details.