How it works...

In this recipe, we outline how to configure the physical interfaces on IOS devices. We first declare the generic parameters (interface duplex and MTU) that apply to all the interfaces. These parameters are defined under the network.yml file. Next, we define all the interface-specific parameters for all our LAN devices under the lan.yml file to be applied to all devices. All these parameters are declared in the interfaces dictionary data structure.

We update our playbook with a new task to configure the physical parameters for all of our LAN devices in our network. We use the ios_interface module to provision all the interface parameters, and we loop over all the interfaces in each node using the interfaces data structure. We set the state to up in order to indicate that the interface should be present and operational.