Deploy IBM Security Guardium virtual appliance using Ansible

IBM Guardium is a data security and protection platform that is designed to discover, classify, monitor, and protect sensitive data across various data sources and environments. It includes features like real-time activity monitoring, vulnerability assessment, and compliance reporting.

Ansible is an open source automation tool that simplifies IT orchestration, configuration management, and application deployment. It uses YAML-based playbooks to define automation tasks and can manage systems across both on-premises and cloud environments through SSH or APIs.

This blog explains how to automate the deployment of Guardium collectors by using Ansible. Collectors are essential components in Guardium that capture and monitor data traffic within your network segments. Automating collector deployment ensures consistent configuration and reduces manual effort, especially when deploying across multiple environments or scaling Guardium deployments.

Various business use cases include:

• Immediate data restore needs: The automated deployment of Guardium appliances is crucial for uninterrupted data restoration and for maintaining business operations and compliance.

• Scaling appliances in response to demand: The rapid deployment of multiple Guardium appliances is essential to address fluctuating security needs and ensure effective security and performance.

• Infrastructure collapse: In the case of an infrastructure failure, swiftly deploying Guardium appliances is vital for restoring security monitoring and compliance because manual reconfiguration can be slow and problematic.

Prerequisites

The IBM Security Guardium software appliance can be installed as a virtual machine in hypervisors. In this blog, we use ESXi Server 6.7 and above. Other prerequisites include:

• A Guardium ISO image (can be downloaded from IBM Passport)
• An Ansible server (basic knowledge of Ansible scripts is required)

Installation workflow

The workflow for this process is as follows:

1. Verify system compatibility.
2. Install and configure the VMware ESX server.
3. Download the Guardium appliance ISO image from the IBM software access catalog.
4. Create a new Guardium virtual machine using the Ansible scripts.
5. Perform the initial configuration for the Guardium appliance.

Steps

Step 1. Copy the code

1. Copy the code from the GitHub repository to the Ansible server.

2. Update the var file. Depending on the environment parameters (hostname, username, password, and so on), make the changes in the var file and copy the code from the previous repository to the Ansible server.

   The following code shows the var file that's present in the guardium-deployment/vars.yml.

   

Step 2. Test the playbooks

Test the Ansible playbooks in a controlled environment to ensure that they interact correctly with EXSI server.

Step 3. Validate the playbooks

1. Validate that the playbook tasks completed successfully based on defined criteria.
2. Verify that the actions triggered by the playbooks in Guardium produce the expected results without unintended consequences.

Step 4. Set up initial and basic configuration

Follow the steps in the product documentation to set up the initial and basic configurations of the Guardium appliance.

Summary

In this blog, you learned how you can effectively automate the deployment of IBM Security Guardium collectors using Ansible to improve operational efficiency, maintain consistency across deployments, and enhance data protection capabilities.