Ansible Role: Add VM Tools for RHEL/CentOS Guests on VirtualBox/VMWare

This role adds vm tools to a RHEL/CentOS (either minimal or full install) guest in VirtualBox or VMWare.

This role was forked from geerlingguy.packer-rhel v1.2.2 (e392ebc).

Requirements

!!! warning "This is out of date!"

Prior to running this role via Packer, you need to make sure Ansible is installed via a shell provisioner, and that preliminary VM configuration (like adding a vagrant user to the appropriate group and the sudoers file) is complete, generally by using a Kickstart installation file (e.g. ks.cfg) with Packer. An example array of provisioners for your Packer .json template would be something like:

"provisioners": [
  {
    "type": "ansible",
    "playbook_file": "ansible/main.yml",
    "role_paths": [
      "/home/cognifloyd/.galaxy/roles/cognifloyd.vm-tools",
    ]
  }
],

The files should contain, at a minimum:

ansible/main.yml:

---
- hosts: all
  become: true
  gather_facts: true
  roles:
    - cognifloyd.vm-tools

You might also want to add another shell provisioner to run cleanup, erasing free space using dd, but this is not required (it will just save a little disk space in the Packer-produced .box file).

If you'd like to add additional roles, make sure you add them to the role_paths array in the template .json file, and then you can include them in main.yml as you normally would. The Ansible configuration will be run over a local connection from within the Linux environment, so all relevant files need to be copied over to the VM; configuratin for this is in the template .json file. Read more: Ansible Local Provisioner.

Role Variables

None.

Dependencies

None.

Example Playbook

- hosts: all
  roles:
    - { role: cognifloyd.vm-tools }

License

MIT / BSD

Author Information

This role is based on the geerlingguy.packer-rhel role that was created in 2014 by Jeff Geerling, author of Ansible for DevOps.