When you want to experiment with Ansible, you will need to setup a test environment. In this blog, you will create a test environment containing one controller and two target machines. This will give you a good setup for experimenting with Ansible without breaking a real machine.

1. Introduction

With Ansible, you can automate repetitive IT tasks and because it is automated, it will also prevent you from making mistakes. Especially when you have to configure several similar environments. The other main advantage is that the configuration is maintained in files and therefore extremely suitable for adding the configuration to version control (e.g. Git). However, in every learning path you need to be able to experiment in order to make mistakes and to learn. In this blog, you will setup an Ansible controller machine and two target machines running in VirtualBox. The Ansible Controller will be the machine where to run the Ansible playbooks from and the target machines will be where tasks can be executed. The test setup looks as follows.