Red Hat CloudForms ships as an appliance to simplify deployment as much as possible – a Red Hat
Enterprise Linux server with the appropriate software loaded, ready to be configured with a few
basic configuration options. Traditionally, these servers are configured using the command line
tool appliance_console. This is a simple, menu-based interface that allows you to configure the
core functionality of the appliance and makes it exceptionally easy to do so. Unfortunately,
menu-based interfaces don’t lend themselves to being automated easily. However, there is a
solution!
All CloudForms appliances ship with another tool called appliance_console_cli. We can combine this
tool with an Ansible playbook to automate the configuration of our appliance(s).