vSphere-Cluster-Ansible

Ansible playbooks for a web hosting cluster running on local vSphere server.

Initial Setup

1. Create Ansible Server
2. Install Ansible
3. Create DB Server
4. Create DB and user for Semaphore (Using playbook under Utilities)
5. Install Semaphore
6. Build your inventory and deploy the rest of the palybooks

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is heavily used. A tunnel is used to route all traffic and a Cloudflare Origin cert is used on the loadbalancer.

Assumptions

Currently these playbooks assume a couple things, this is being worked on and this list will be reduced eventually.

• An ansible user with passwordless sudo and public key auth needs to already exist. I use Cubic to include this in the initial unintended install of ubuntu.
• All VMs use DHCP and a network of 10.90.90.0/24
• All VMs are Ubuntu 24
• Cloudflare tunnels are setup manually currently.
• Zabbix templates and Autodiscover actions need to be configured manually.
• A non public vault password is currently needed.

Initial Setup

1. Create a server for Ansible to run on. Install ansible.
2. Clone this repo. Create a hosts file at /etc/ansible/hosts with just the database group
3. Run the initial playbook. ansible-playbook init-site.yml --ask-vault-pass
4. Run the NewDatabase.yml playbook to create a database for Semaphore
5. Install Semaphore
6. Setup Sempaphore by running semaphore setup
7. Run Semaphore semaphore server --config=/etc/semaphore/config.json , You can use screen or a startup manager to make this start automatically.
8. Go to http://ip-of-ansible-server:3000 in a web browser.
9. Setup your inventory using the example in this repo (ExampleInventory)
10. Setup your Variable Group using extra_vars_TEMPLATE.yml as an example.
11. Setup this or your fork of this repository under Repositories.
12. Setup your playbooks under Task Templates
13. Run site.yml to deploy entire cluster
14. Create new sites on the cluster with NewWordpressSite.yml

Host Groups

The following host groups are used in these playbooks.

• [control]
• [loadbalancers]
• [web]
• [wp-admin]
• [nfs-server]
• [database]
• [tunnel]
• [zabbix-server]
• [logging]
• [bluesky]
• [ubuntu]

Playbooks

• site.yml - Entire Cluster. Meant to be run on a schedule/cron. Weekly

*Lifecycle

• NewDatabase.yml - Creates a database, allows the rest of the cluster to talk to it.
• NewWordpressSite.yml - Creates a new wordpress website on the cluster.

*Utility

• ClearNginxCache.yml - Clears the FastCGI cache for a website. Useful to run this after making big changes to a site.
• ReloadWeb.yml - Reloads the configuration for all of the Web and WPAdmin servers. Run after making nginx config changes.
• WordpressUpdater.yml - Updates all Plugins, all Themes, and the core Wordpress version for all WordPress sites on the cluster. Meant to be run on a schedule/cron. Daily