Ansible Mirror Inventory Project

An Ansible mirror inventory project, also known as a mirror inventory project or reference inventory project, is an open-source specialized type of Ansible inventory project that integrates Vagrant project functionality to mimic real-world infrastructure locally. It combines Ansible automation with Vagrant for virtual machine orchestration, enabling Ansible engineers to develop, test, and validate Ansible content and configurations in a controlled, local environment.

The Ansible mirror inventory project serves as a cornerstone of the C2 Platform approach, aligning with the open, unless principle and complementing the Ansible development environment. It acts as an open-source counterpart to a closed-source inventory project in a government domain or data center, mirroring its structure and functionality while providing a reference implementation for prototyping and validation.

As Jeff Geerling notes in his book Ansible for DevOps , this setup is essential for simulating real-world infrastructure locally, allowing engineers to “mimic” production-like environments on their development desktops.

Key Features

• Integration of Inventory and Vagrant: Combines the structure of an inventory project, including inventory files, playbooks, and group variables, with a Vagrantfile for defining virtual machines, networks, and provisioning steps.
• Local Simulation: Enables testing of Ansible collections and roles against virtualized hosts that mirror actual infrastructure, promoting consistency and repeatability.
• GitOps Alignment: Supports GitOps practices by managing changes through environment branches and merge requests, facilitating promotion across simulated environments.

Examples

Key examples of Ansible mirror inventory projects include:

• RWS GIS Platform Ansible Mirror Inventory Project : Automates deployment of core GIS components (ArcGIS Suite, FME, Geoweb) alongside supporting services (Active Directory, AWX) and management tools (CheckMK, Splunk) using Vagrant and Ansible. Serves as a local replica for development, testing, and prototyping, mirroring production setup in the Rijkswaterstaat (RWS) domain.
• C2 Platform Ansible Reference Inventory Project: Ansible Inventory project for C2 Platform reference implementation.

Additional Information

For further reference, explore the following information:

• Reference Implementations: An open-source, fully functional example of a system that mirrors a closed-source setup.
• Development Environment: A local open-source development environment boosts Ansible automation by providing maximum flexibility and productivity for rapid iteration, testing, and independence from external infrastructure teams or even other engineers on your team due to shared environments.