Automation with Salt or Ansible

[romanroma]

I am looking into Data Center automation, and I have found Salt and Ansible. Both solutions look promising; however, I am not sure which one is supported greater on Cisco Nexus and Catalyst switches.

Does anyone have stories or what product supports Cisco greater.

[Sergiu.Daniluk · Accepted solution]

In my opinion, Ansible is much better and much easier to use with Nexus devices. I cannot comment too much reg catalyst switches, but I belive is similar story there. You have a lot of modules already existing there: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/list_of_network_modules.html#nxos plus you can use roles to simplify the deployments. 

You can find an example of how I use ansible in my lab to quickly fire up a topology I need https://github.com/msdaniluk/aci_tenantbooks 

Here, each inventory file is the config I need to push to my switches (nexus standalone and aci), and the playbook remains the same, through the use of the roles. 

Hope it helps,

Sergiu

[romanroma]

@Sergiu.Daniluk 

Thank you again for you help, and detailed posts. I have already installed and just taking small steps with Ansible, so very positive on being able to automate some configurations.