ansible-vmware

Working with Ansible and VMware ESXi/vCenter

Prerequisites

• VMware ESXi
• vCenter
• Ansible 2.4.4 or greater
• one VM template in VMware ESXi/vCenter with an OS installed to use as a source

That last one for me is basically the following:

1. Create a VM in ESXi
2. Install an OS on it
3. Convert it to a template

Caveats

My current VMware ESXi environment is statically managed - No DHCP, no LDAP, not much use of DNS - so that means that dynamic inventory doesn't apply and things are managed by a hosts file for the most part.

I also primarily only use Linux, and RedHat at that. This project doesn't have much Windows+Ansible at the moment, though it's on the list to get in at some point.

Usage

Use pip and pipenv.

sudo easy_install pip
pip install pipenv
pipenv install
pipenv shell

ansible all -i inventory --list-hosts
ansible-playbook -i inventory/esxi playbooks/esxi/update_template.yml
ansible-playbook -i inventory/prod_db playbooks/esxi/refresh_vm.yml
ansible-playbook -i inventory/prod_db playbooks/esxi/create_snapshot.yml
ansible-playbook -i inventory/prod_db playbooks/prod_db/clean.yml
ansible-playbook -i inventory/prod_db playbooks/prod_db/snapshot.yml

If you don't want to use pipenv, you need to have

• ansible
• passlib
• pyvmomi

in your PYTHONPATH.

Set the variable values in roles/esxi/vars/main.yml for your VMware ESXi/vCenter environment.

Set the variable values in inventory/esxi/group_vars/all.yml for your VMware ESXi/vCenter environment.

Set the variable values for each host in the esxi inventory.

Set the variable values for each host in the prod_db inventory.

Set the proper configurations in roles/common/files.

Notes

The vmware_guest module in Ansible has more functionality than what is demonstrated here.

There are potential opportunities for naming convention collisions: My VMware environment is tiny, so I don't use the approach of dynamic inventory at all, though it should be investigated. That means you should pay attention to naming conventions, or change the plays/tasks to use the returned ids from the vmware_guest module.

Performance could probably be improved with more register and when combinations in the roles. That is an exercise for the user.