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For a little while now I’ve been playing around with Ansible and exploring its VMware modules.  While using Ansible with the VMware modules is not overly complex.  I quickly realised there were very little examples out on the web for the VMware administrator.   So I thought I would put together a very simple crash course on getting starting with Ansible and VMware.

The intention here is not to explain how Ansible works.  There’s a lot of information out on the web around that, plus I’m still learn too.  Instead I just wanted to put together something relatively simple.  Show how to quick and dirty get Ansible installed on a Linux box with the required VMware SDK.  Then create an Ansible playbook to build a basic environment in vCenter.  This will involve a new Datacenter, a Cluster, and a Resource Pool.

So let’s get started.

Installing Ansible

Firstly let’s install Ansible.  Ubuntu and CentOS are common distros so I cover them both below.  With Ubuntu I also add the Ansible repository.  While I don’t believe it’s really required it seems to be what most people do.

Ubuntu

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible

sudo apt-get install ansible

CentOS

sudo yum install ansible

Once installed we can run a simple verification check to see if the install was successful.

ansible -m ping localhost

localhost | SUCCESS => {
"changed": false,
"failed": false,
"ping": "pong"
}

Installing pyVmomi

Now we install pyVmomi.  This is VMware’s Python SDK for managing vCenter and ESXi and is required to use the VMware modules that come with Ansible.

sudo pip install pyvmomi

And that’s all that we really need to install to build our first playbook and run it against vCenter.  To run our playbook we’re going to need to create a few folders and files.  The structure will look something similar to below.

├── ansible-vmware
│   ├── group_vars
│   │   └── all.yml
│   └── vmware_create_infra.yml

Let’s create a folder called ansible-vmware and a varibles folder called group_vars below that

mkdir ansible-vmware
mkdir ansible-vmware/group_vars

Now even though this is a crash course to running our first VMware playbook I want to at least do things half right and not have any plaintext passwords.  So before I go too far into creating the yaml files I want to create an encrypted string of our vCenter’s administrator SSO password.  I do that with the following line.

ansible-vault encrypt_string {admin_sso_password} --ask-vault-pass

You’ll be asked for an Ansible vault password and then receive back an encrypted string.  The vault password will be used when we run our play (don’t forget it).  Copy and paste the output and put it aside for a minute.  We’re going to pasta it in our group_vars file that we’re about to now create.

Let’s now create that variables file inside the group_vars folder and call it all.yml

touch ansible-vmware/group_vars/all.yml

Using vi or nano or whatever you prefer to edit the file.  Let’s edit the all.yml file and add in all the variables we will use in our playbook.  Again, crash course, so don’t worry too much about what each one does right this minute.  Just know that we have to reference these values multiple times in our playbook and having a variables yaml file really helps with that.

For the vcenter_password variable use the encrypted string we created in the step above and paste it in so it looks similar to below.  Obviously feel free to change any of the values, datacenter, cluster, etc.

---
datacenter: ansible_dc1
cluster: ansible_cluster1
resource_pool: ansible_resource1
datastore: datastore01
vcenter_ip: 192.168.0.100
vcenter_username: administrator
vcenter_password: !vault |
          $ANSIBLE_VAULT;1.1;AES256
          24242245545455516332373965613662616531653266326362643533613932356530663263326663
          65363339653337333478977865425424245245824524824858666463373838323330666633363763
          65323436643563333334527873245674247868727672789689787867867878643130616261336262
          3462323161633933320a653030333478567825725727855427887878787886666624313862663462
          8775

Now we create our main playbook.  This is going to contain all our plays and reference all our variables we just created in global_vars/all.yml

touch ansible-vmware/vmware_create_infra.yml

Like we did with the variables file lets edit this file. Again, vi, nano, whatever.  Copy and past the information below.  Things to note.  Yaml files don’t like tabs.  So spaces only and position is very important.

- hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  tasks:
    - name: include vars
      include_vars:
        dir: group_vars

    - name: Create Datacenter in vCenter
      local_action:
        module: vmware_datacenter
        datacenter_name: "{{ datacenter }}"
        hostname: "{{ vcenter_ip}}"
        username: "{{ vcenter_username}}"
        password: "{{ vcenter_password}}"
        validate_certs: False
        state: present

    - name: Create Cluster in datacenter
      local_action:
        module: vmware_cluster
        hostname: "{{ vcenter_ip}}"
        username: "{{ vcenter_username}}"
        password: "{{ vcenter_password}}"
        validate_certs: False
        state: present
        datacenter_name: "{{ datacenter }}"
        cluster_name: "{{ cluster }}"
        enable_ha: yes
        enable_drs: yes

    - name: Create Resource pool in cluster
      vmware_resource_pool:
        hostname: "{{ vcenter_ip }}"
        username: "{{ vcenter_username}}"
        password: "{{ vcenter_password}}"
        validate_certs: False
        state: present
        datacenter: "{{ datacenter }}"
        cluster: "{{ cluster }}"
        resource_pool: "{{ resource_pool }}"

Assuming you created the files correctly and have the right password we are ready to run our first Ansible playbook against vCenter.

ansible-playbook ansible-vmware/vmware_create_infra.yml --ask-vault-pass

This should produce something similar to below

PLAY [localhost] ***************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] *********************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [include vars] ************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Create Datacenter in vCenter] ********************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost -> localhost]

TASK [Create Cluster in datacenter] ********************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost -> localhost]

TASK [Create Resource pool in cluster] *****************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost]

PLAY RECAP *********************************************************************************************************************************
localhost : ok=5 changed=3 unreachable=0 failed=0

The resulting output in the vSphere Client should look similar to below.

The cool part is we can run the same command again and again and nothing will change as long as our environment is consistent with our defined yaml files.  They in essence become our working as-built doco.

So the goal from what we’ve just done above was not to actually build an environment but rather to show you how quick and simple we can get Ansible up and running and configuring a vSphere environment.  I’ve avoided a lot of the technical stuff so instead you can think about how this might help you in your environment.

In future posts I might go into more details on specific modules and how to use them but for now I think I might just focus on what’s possible with Ansible and VMware.

References

Ansible VMware Getting Started

pyVmomi GitHub Page