How to collect information about your environment

Introduction

This section shows you how to utilize Ansible to collect information about your environment. This information is useful for the other tutorials.

Scenario requirements

In this scenario we’ve got a vCenter with an ESXi host.

Our environment is pre-initialized with the following elements:

  • A datacenter called my_dc

  • A cluster called my_cluster

  • An ESXi host called esxi1 is in the cluster

  • Two datastores on the ESXi: rw_datastore and ro_datastore

  • A dvswitch based guest network

Finally, we use the environment variables to authenticate ourselves as explained in How to configure the vmware_rest collection.

How to collect information

In these examples, we use the vcenter_*_info module to collect information about the associated resources.

All these modules return a value key. Depending on the context, this value key will be either a list or a dictionary.

Datacenter

Here we use the vcenter_datacenter_info module to list all the datacenters:

- name: collect a list of the datacenters
  vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_datacenter_info:
  register: my_datacenters

Result

As expected, the value key of the output is a list.

{
    "value": [
        {
            "name": "my_dc",
            "datacenter": "datacenter-1630"
        }
    ],
    "changed": false
}

Cluster

Here we do the same with vcenter_cluster_info:

- name: Build a list of all the clusters
  vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_cluster_info:
  register: all_the_clusters

Result

{
    "value": [
        {
            "drs_enabled": false,
            "cluster": "domain-c1636",
            "name": "my_cluster",
            "ha_enabled": false
        }
    ],
    "changed": false
}

And we can also fetch the details about a specific cluster, with the cluster parameter:

- name: Retrieve details about the first cluster
  vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_cluster_info:
    cluster: "{{ all_the_clusters.value[0].cluster }}"
  register: my_cluster_info

Result

And the value key of the output is this time a dictionary.

{
    "value": {
        "name": "my_cluster",
        "resource_pool": "resgroup-1637"
    },
    "id": "domain-c1636",
    "changed": false
}

Datastore

Here we use vcenter_datastore_info to get a list of all the datastores:

- name: Retrieve a list of all the datastores
  vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_datastore_info:
  register: my_datastores

Result

{
    "value": [
        {
            "datastore": "datastore-1644",
            "name": "local",
            "type": "VMFS",
            "free_space": 13523484672,
            "capacity": 15032385536
        },
        {
            "datastore": "datastore-1645",
            "name": "ro_datastore",
            "type": "NFS",
            "free_space": 24638349312,
            "capacity": 26831990784
        },
        {
            "datastore": "datastore-1646",
            "name": "rw_datastore",
            "type": "NFS",
            "free_space": 24638349312,
            "capacity": 26831990784
        }
    ],
    "changed": false
}

Folder

And here again, you use the vcenter_folder_info module to retrieve a list of all the folders.

- name: Build a list of all the folders
  vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_folder_info:
  register: my_folders

Result

{
    "value": [
        {
            "folder": "group-d1",
            "name": "Datacenters",
            "type": "DATACENTER"
        }
    ],
    "changed": false
}

Most of the time, you will just want one type of folder. In this case we can use filters to reduce the amount to collect. Most of the _info modules come with similar filters.

- name: Build a list of all the folders with the type VIRTUAL_MACHINE and called vm
  vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_folder_info:
    filter_type: VIRTUAL_MACHINE
    filter_names:
      - vm
  register: my_folders

Result

{
    "value": [
        {
            "folder": "group-v1631",
            "name": "vm",
            "type": "VIRTUAL_MACHINE"
        }
    ],
    "changed": false
}