Fedora, Ansible and vSphere

I'm working on testing OpenShift 4.2 on vSphere, in my home lab.  Eventually, this will lead to an OCP 4.2 workshop, but I need to be able to do repeated builds, easily, first.

There is a really nice Ansible-based deployer already available, that uses Terraform, here.  However, I wanted to use pure Ansible, so I, as usual, made more work for myself.

I started going through the Ansible/vSphere configuration document, here.  I quickly discovered that the instructions, while complete, didn't seem to work on Fedora 30 or 31.  The issue turned out to be that the built-in Ansible didn't find the vSphere automation SDK, even when built into an activated virtualenv.

To work around this, I installed Ansible, itself, in the virtualenv.  So the completed steps to a working Ansible/vSphere integration are:

$ virtualenv ansible
$ source ansible/bin/activate
$ pip install ansible
$ git clone https://github.com/vmware/vsphere-automation-sdk-python.git
$ cd vsphere-automation-sdk-python/
$ pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall -r requirements.txt --extra-index-url file:///~/vsphere-automation-sdk-python/lib

Once that is complete, you can use the vSphere dynamic inventory plugin, by doing the following:

$ cat << EOF > ansible.cfg
[inventory]
enable_plugins = vmware_vm_inventory
EOF
$ cat << EOF > inventory.vmware.yml
plugin: vmware_vm_inventory
strict: False
hostname: vcenter
username: <vCenter admin user>
password: <vCenter admin password>
validate_certs: False
with_tags: True

Then, you can run an inventory query against your vCenter server:

$ ansible-inventory -i inventory.vmware.yml --list
{
    "_meta": {
        "hostvars": {
            "Fedora 31 (64-bit)_420ce9bb-dce1-05c6-33f5-6f2072436499": {
                "ansible_host": "10.0.1.66",
                "config.cpuHotAddEnabled": false,
                "config.cpuHotRemoveEnabled": false,
                "config.hardware.numCPU": 1,
                "config.instanceUuid": "500c0fdc-f1a7-1d79-d0a3-642e8e26642c",
                "config.name": "Fedora 31 (64-bit)",
                "config.template": false,
                "guest.guestId": "fedora64Guest",
                "guest.guestState": "running",
                "guest.hostName": "fedora31.jajcs.loc",
                "guest.ipAddress": "10.0.1.66",
                "name": "Fedora 31 (64-bit)",
                "runtime.maxMemoryUsage": 2048
            },
            "VMware vCenter Server Appliance_564d4d0f-52f6-5d7d-bfc1-6641b464586b": {
                "ansible_host": "10.0.1.15",
                "config.cpuHotAddEnabled": true,
                "config.cpuHotRemoveEnabled": true,
                "config.hardware.numCPU": 4,
                "config.instanceUuid": "524f8660-11e1-df20-ab50-049c484fa387",
                "config.name": "VMware vCenter Server Appliance",
                "config.template": false,
                "guest.guestId": "vmwarePhoton64Guest",
                "guest.guestState": "running",
                "guest.hostName": "vcenter.jajcs.loc",
                "guest.ipAddress": "10.0.1.15",
                "name": "VMware vCenter Server Appliance",
                "runtime.maxMemoryUsage": 16384
            }
        }
    },
    "all": {
        "children": [
            "fedora64Guest",
            "other3xLinux64Guest",
            "poweredOn",
            "ungrouped"
        ]
    },
    "fedora64Guest": {
        "hosts": [
            "Fedora 31 (64-bit)_420ce9bb-dce1-05c6-33f5-6f2072436499",
        ]
    },
    "other3xLinux64Guest": {
        "hosts": [
            "VMware vCenter Server Appliance_564d4d0f-52f6-5d7d-bfc1-6641b464586b"
        ]
    },
    "poweredOn": {
        "hosts": [
            "Fedora 31 (64-bit)_420ce9bb-dce1-05c6-33f5-6f2072436499",
            "VMware vCenter Server Appliance_564d4d0f-52f6-5d7d-bfc1-6641b464586b",

        ]
    },
}

Good luck!