Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python.

Automate common administrative and security tasks with Python

Bassem Aly

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781788992640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming in Python
• Index: Computer Science

Invent your own Python scripts to automate your infrastructureAbout This Book• Make the most of Python libraries and modules to automate your infrastructure• Leverage Python programming to automate server configurations and administration tasks• Efficiently develop your Python skill setWho This Book Is ForHands-On Enterprise Automation with Python is for system administrators and DevOps engineers who are looking for an alternative to major automation frameworks such as Puppet and Chef. Basic programming knowledge with Python and Linux shell scripting is necessary.What You Will Learn• Understand common automation modules used in Python• Develop Python scripts to manage network devices• Automate common Linux administration tasks with Ansible and Fabric• Managing Linux processes• Administrate VMware, OpenStack, and AWS instances with Python• Security automation and sharing code on GitHubIn DetailHands-On Enterprise Automation with Python starts by covering the set up of a Python environment to perform automation tasks, as well as the modules, libraries, and tools you will be using. We'll explore examples of network automation tasks using simple Python programs and Ansible. Next, we will walk you through automating administration tasks with Python Fabric, where you will learn to perform server configuration and administration, along with system administration tasks such as user management, database management, and process management. As you progress through this book, you'll automate several testing services with Python scripts and perform automation tasks on virtual machines and cloud infrastructure with Python. In the concluding chapters, you will cover Python-based offensive security tools and learn how to automate your security tasks.By the end of this book, you will have mastered the skills of automating several system administration tasks with Python.Style and approachThis book will follow a practical approach to help you script and automate tasks using Python.

Creating and Managing VMware Virtual Machines

For a long long time, virtualization has been an important technology in the IT industry as it provides an efficient way for hardware resources and allows us to easily manage application life cycle inside the Virtual Machine (VM). In 2001, VMware released the first version of the ESXi that could run directly over the commodity off the shelf (COTS) server while converting it to a resource that could be consumed by multiple separate virtual machines. In this chapter, we will explore many options available to automate the building of virtual machine thanks to Python and Ansible.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Setting up the lab environment
• Generating a VMX file using Jinja2
• VMware Python clients
• Using Ansible playbooks to manage instances

Setting up the environment

For this chapter, we will have VMware ESXi version 5.5 installed over a Cisco UCS server and host a few virtual machines. We need to enable a few things in our ESXi server in order to expose some external ports to the outside world:

1. The first thing is to enable both Shell and SSH access to the ESXi console. Basically, ESXi allows you to manage it using the vSphere client (based on C# for the versions before 5.5.x and based on HTML for version 6 and up). Once we enable the Shell and SSH access, this will give us the ability to use the CLI to manage virtual infrastructure and to perform tasks such as creating, deleting, and customizing the virtual machine.

2. Access the ESXi vSphere client and go to Configuration, then choose Security Profiles from the left tab, and finally click on Properties:

A pop-up window will be opened that contains a list of services, statuses, and various options that can be applied:

3. Select SSH service and then click on Option. Another pop-up window will be opened.
4. Choose the first option that reads Start automatically if any ports are open, and stop when all ports are closed under the Startup Policy.
5. Also, click on Start under Service Commands and hit OK:

Repeat the same steps again for the ESXi Shell service. This will ensure that both services will be started once the ESXi server has started and will be opened and ready to accept the connection. You can test both services, SSH to the ESXi IP address and provide the root credentials as with SSH connection:

Generating a VMX file using Jinja2

The basic unit for a virtual machine (sometimes called a guest machine) is the VMX file. This file contains all the settings needed to bui...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Packt Upsell
• Contributors
• Preface
• Setting Up Our Python Environment
• Common Libraries Used in Automation
• Setting Up the Network Lab Environment
• Using Python to Manage Network Devices
• Extracting Useful Data from Network Devices
• Configuration Generator with Python and Jinja2
• Parallel Execution of Python Script
• Preparing a Lab Environment
• Using the Subprocess Module
• Running System Administration Tasks with Fabric
• Generating System Reports and System Monitoring
• Interacting with the Database
• Ansible for System Administration
• Creating and Managing VMware Virtual Machines
• Interacting with the OpenStack API
• Automating AWS with Boto3
• Using the Scapy Framework
• Building a Network Scanner Using Python
• Other Books You May Enjoy