Automation with Ansible (2) - Create/Provisioning Virtual Machine using vsphere_client from VSphere environment

Creating/Provisioing VM using ansible

From this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to create empty VM using vsphere_client module. This is really simple example and most configuration file came from Ansible document

Reference

• Ansible vshper_client{:rel=nofollow}
• Github code

Installing pysphere module

As specified from the above reference, we need to install pysphere module from python.

[ansible@ansible01 ~]$ sudo pip install pysphere
Collecting pysphere
  Downloading pysphere-0.1.7.zip (516kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 522kB 977kB/s 
Installing collected packages: pysphere
  Running setup.py install for pysphere ... done
Successfully installed pysphere-0.1.7
[ansible@ansible01 ~]$ 

Checking VCenter options

From the above reference, we will need to prepare following parameteres from VCenter.

• vcenter_hostname: this is the vcenter server name. In my case FLCATSVCT01(10.200.0.11)
  
• username: login for vcenter
• password: password for vcenter
• guest: guest name. For this testing, I will use "centostest01"
• state: powered_on or powered_off
• folder under vm_extra_config: I am going to put the VM under "Docker" folder, so the name will be "Docker" for this testing
• network from vm_nic: network name. For this testing, "VM Network".
  
• datastore: This is the storage name. Check the datacenter name from vSphere Web Client. For this, I am going to use "PRD-NFS-01"
  
• folder under vm_disk: This option doesn't work for me. All VM is created under root folder.
• datacenter from esxi: FlairTest.
  
• hostname from esxi: esx host IP. For this testing, 10.200.0.51

sample centostest.yml to create new vm

---
- name: Create VM
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  tasks:
  - name: createVM
    vsphere_guest:
      vcenter_hostname: 10.200.0.11
      validate_certs: no
      username: vsphere_login
      password: vsphere_password
      guest: centostest01
      state: powered_off
      vm_extra_config:
        vcpu.hotadd: yes
        mem.hotadd: yes
        notes: This is a test VM for centos
        folder: Docker
      vm_disk:
        disk1:
          size_gb: 20
          type: thin
          datastore: PRD-NFS-01
      vm_nic:
        nic1:
          type: vmxnet3
          network: VM Network
          network_type: standard
      vm_hardware:
        memory_mb: 2048
        num_cpus: 2
        osid: centos64Guest
        scsi: paravirtual
      esxi:
        datacenter: FlairTest
        hostname: 10.200.0.51

Result

We didn't specify the hosts for this testing. Ignore the warning message.

[ansible@ansible01 test]$ ansible-playbook createvmtest.yml 
 [WARNING]: Unable to parse /etc/ansible/hosts as an inventory source

 [WARNING]: No inventory was parsed, only implicit localhost is available

 [WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the
implicit localhost does not match 'all'


PLAY [Create VM] **************************************************************************

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

TASK [createVM] ***************************************************************************
changed: [localhost]

PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0   

[ansible@ansible01 test]$ 

Summary

From this example, we created new vm using Ansible successfully. One of issue on this is that an OS is not installed yet. From next tutorial, we will create new VM by copying new VM from existing template.