Introduction to Ansible for VMware

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 (you may need to use pip3, depending on your OS/distro):

$ 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.

See also

pyVmomi

The GitHub Page of pyVmomi

pyVmomi Issue Tracker

The issue tracker for the pyVmomi project

govc

govc is a vSphere CLI built on top of govmomi

Working with playbooks

An introduction to playbooks