Ansible Role: Customize VMware VCSA

Customizes a newly deployed VCSA. The role attempts to configure the following:

• Creates a new datacenter and cluster and adds a set of hosts
• Configures NTP and SSH services to autostart
• Creates a DVS with two uplinks and creates vMotion and VM Network portgroups
• Migrates any VMs and the VMK0 interface to the DVS
• Enables DRS and HA
• Mounts NFS datastores

Requirements

The role expects an environment that roughly conforms to these assumptions:

• There is an available VCSA to configure
• There is at least one ESXi host to add to the VCSA
• Each ESXi host has at least two 10Gb network adaptors
• All network plumbing is in place
• Hostvars files for each ESXi host denoting the vmnic names to use
• JMESPath, jq,

Role Variables

The following variables are defined in the defaults/main.yml file:

# vCenter
vcenter_hostname: "devvcsa.tme.nebulon.com"
vcenter_datacenter: "SC0"
vcenter_cluster: "AppFactory"
# dvs
# Name cannot contain a "-"
vcenter_dvs_name: "dvs_appfactory"

This role defines the following variables in the vars/main.yml file:

ntp_servers: [10.100.72.10,10.100.72.11]

nfs_servers:
  - name: "ISO"
    nfs_mount_path: "/data/tme"
    nfs_server_ip: 10.100.24.8
  - name: backup
    nfs_mount_path: "/mnt/data/tme"
    nfs_server_ip: 10.100.24.202

esxi_services:
  - ntpd
  - TSM
  - TSM-SSH

suppressshellwarning: 1


vcenter_hostname: "devvcsa.tme.nebulon.com"
vcenter_datacenter: "SC0"
vcenter_cluster: "AppFactory"
vcenter_dvs_name: "dvs_appfactory"
vcenter_dvs_version: "8.0.0"
vcenter_dvs_mtu: "9000"
vcenter_dvs_uplink_count: 2
vcenter_dvs_uplink_prefix: "Uplink_"
vcenter_dvs_discovery_protocol: lldp
vcenter_dvs_disocvery_operation: both
vcenter_dvs_folder: "/{{ vcenter_datacenter }}/network/{{ vcenter_dvs_name }}"
vcenter_dvs_network_folder: "{{ vcenter_dvs_name }}"
vcenter_dvs_vmotion_pg: "vmotion"
vcenter_dvs_vmotion_vlan: 17
vcenter_dvs_vmotion_vlan_trunk: false
vcenter_dvs_vmnetwork_vlan: 0
vcenter_dvs_vmnetwork_vlan_trunk: false
vcenter_dvs_portgroup_vmnetwork: "vmnetwork"
vcenter_dvs_portgroup_lb_policy: loadbalance_loadbased

# Vault credentials
vcenter_username: "{{ vault_vcenter_username }}"
vcenter_password: "{{ vault_vcenter_password }}"
esxi_username: "{{ vault_esxi_username }}"
esxi_password: "{{ vault_esxi_password }}"

Additionally, there are four other variables for the vMotion network and vmnic device names of the 10GB interfaces used when configuring the DVS. The role expects these variables to be available in hostvars and I suggest placing them in a host_vars file per host. These could be placed in inventory as well.

vmotionip: "10.100.28.46"
vmotionnetmask: "255.255.255.0"
d0_vmnic: "vmnic0"
d1_vmnic: "vmnic1"

Dependencies

Ansible community.vmware collection v3.2.0+

Example Playbook

# ===========================================================================
# Customize the VCSA installation
# ===========================================================================
- name: Customize VCSA
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  module_defaults:
    group/vmware:
      hostname: '{{ vcenter_hostname }}'
      username: '{{ vcenter_username }}'
      password: '{{ vcenter_password }}'
      validate_certs: false
    vmware_host:
      datacenter_name: '{{ vcenter_datacenter }}'
      cluster_name: '{{ vcenter_cluster }}'
      esxi_username: '{{ esxi_username }}'
      esxi_password: '{{ esxi_password }}'
    vmware_host_service_manager:
      cluster_name: '{{ vcenter_cluster }}'
    vmware_host_config_manager:
      cluster_name: '{{ vcenter_cluster }}'
    vmware_datastore_info:
      datacenter_name: '{{ vcenter_datacenter }}'

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

  roles:
    - jedimt.vmware_vcsa_customization

License

MIT

Author Information

Aaron Patten aaronpatten@gmail.com