Ansible Role: Deploy VMs

Deploys one or more VMs from a template in vCenter.

Requirements

• Host packages apt update && sudo apt install nfs-common sshpass -y

• OVFTool 4.5+ (for vSphere 8)

• Pyvmomi and jmespath python3 -m pip install pyvmomi jmespath

Role Variables

The vCenter username and password are intended to be stored in Ansible Vault like so:

# vCenter credentials, stored in an Ansible Vault
vault_vcenter_username: youraccounthere@vsphere.local
vault_vcenter_password: supersekritpassword

There are VM specific variables defined in the inventory for each VM to be deployed by default, including the IP address, notes, disk size, memory size and number of vCPUs. For example:

k8s_master:
  hosts:
    dev-k8s-master-01.tme.nebulon.com:
      guest_custom_ip: '10.100.24.41'
      guest_notes: "Dev K8s control node"
      size_gb: 40
      memory_mb: 8192
      guest_vcpu: 2
      loadbalancer: "dev-k8s-haproxy-01.tme.nebulon.com:6443"

All other variables are defined in the vars/main.yml file.

Dependencies

There must be a virtual machine template in the inventory that can be used for creating the clones.

Example Playbook

# ===========================================================================
# Deploy VMs to a vCenter server
# ===========================================================================
- name: Deploy VMs
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  gather_facts: false
  tags: play_deploy_vms

  vars_files:
    # Ansible vault with all required passwords
    - "../../credentials.yml"

  roles:
    - jedimt.deploy_vms

License

MIT

Author Information

Aaron Patten aaronpatten@gmail.com