Introduction to Ansible for VMware

• Introduction
• Requirements
• vmware_guest module

Introduction

Ansible provides various modules to manage VMware infrastructure, which includes datacenter, cluster, host system and virtual machine.

Requirements

Ansible VMware modules are written on top of pyVmomi. pyVmomi is the Python SDK for the VMware vSphere API that allows user to manage ESX, ESXi, and vCenter infrastructure. You can install pyVmomi using pip:

$ pip install pyvmomi

Ansible VMware modules leveraging latest vSphere(6.0+) features are using vSphere Automation Python SDK. The vSphere Automation Python SDK also has client libraries, documentation, and sample code for VMware Cloud on AWS Console APIs, NSX VMware Cloud on AWS integration APIs, VMware Cloud on AWS site recovery APIs, NSX-T APIs.

You can install vSphere Automation Python SDK using pip:

$ pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/vmware/vsphere-automation-sdk-python.git

Note:

Installing vSphere Automation Python SDK also installs pyvmomi. A separate installation of pyvmomi is not required.

vmware_guest module

The vmware_guest module manages various operations related to virtual machines in the given ESXi or vCenter server.