Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > Dell PowerMax: Ansible Modules Best Practices > Writing a playbook to provision PowerMax Storage
Provisioning storage in Ansible requires listing the steps as tasks for a playbook to create or reuse components and present storage volumes to the hosts and cluster using a masking view.
Basic provisioning of PowerMax storage with Ansible requires creating four or five constructs on the PowerMax array, which constitutes a masking view. Figure 7 shows the components of a masking view. Each component has a corresponding Ansible module installed with the dellemc.PowerMax collection.
The components of a masking view are:
A masking view construct encompasses the storage group, port group, and a host or host group. The masking view makes the volumes in a storage group visible to the host or cluster. Masking views are managed by the maskingview module.
Masking view component names must be unique on the array and cannot exceed 64 characters. Only alphanumeric characters, underscores ( _ ), and (-) are allowed. Names are case-insensitive, however Python and YAML are both case-sensitive, so case must match.