Add a New Hard Disk to VMware vSphere Virtual Machine - Ansible module vmware_guest_disk

How to automate the addition of a 1GB size Hard Disk to VMware Virtual Machine guest named “myvm” using Ansible Playbook and vmware_guest_disk module.

May 24, 2022

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How to Add a new hard disk to VMware vSphere Virtual Machine with Ansible?

I’m going to show you a live demo and some simple Ansible code. I’m Luca Berton and welcome to today’s episode of Ansible Pilot.

Ansible Add disk to VMware vSphere Virtual Machine

community.vmware.vmware_guest_disk
Manage disks related to virtual machines in given vCenter infrastructure Let’s talk about the Ansible module vmware_guest_disk. The full name is community.vmware.vmware_guest_disk, which means that is part of the collection of modules to interact with VMware, community-supported. It manages disks related to the virtual machines in a given vCenter infrastructure.

Parameters

hostname string / username string / password string / datacenter string / validate_certs boolean — connection details
datacenter string — The datacenter name to which the virtual machine belongs to
scsi_controller / unit_number / scsi_type string — SCSI controller details
size / size_kb / size_mb / size_gb / size_tb string — Disk storage size
disk_mode string — persistent / independent_persistent / independent_nonpersistent

The following parameters are useful in order to Add disk to VMware vSphere Virtual Machine using the module vmware_guest_disk.

First of all, we need to establish the connection with VMware vSphere or VMware vCenter using a plethora of self-explicative parameters: hostname, username, password, datacenter, and validate_certs.

Once the connection is successfully established you could specify the desired disk configuration, in this add a new disk to the virtual machine.

The mandatory parameters are only datacenter and unit_number.

The datacenter parameter specifies which datacenter name the virtual machine belongs to, for resources allocations.

The disk must be connected to a SCSI controller inside the virtual machine, so you should specify all the small details like scsi_controller, unit_number, and scsi_type.

You might be interested in deep-dive some performance analysis to property adjust these parameters.

You could specify the disk size via various parameters according to the needed size unit: kb, MB, GB, TB, etc.

One most important parameter is the disk_mode, default to persistent mode, other options are independent_persistent and independent_nonpersistent.

demo

How to Add a disk to VMware vSphere Virtual Machine with Ansible. I’m going to show you how to add a 1GB additional disk to a Virtual Machine named “myvm” using Ansible Playbook in a SCSI controller number 1 and unit number 1.

code

vm_add_disk.yml

---
- name: vm disk demo
  hosts: localhost
  become: false
  gather_facts: false
  collections:
    - community.vmware
  pre_tasks:
    - include_vars: vars.yml
  tasks:
    - name: add disk to vm
      vmware_guest_disk:
        hostname: "{{ vcenter_hostname }}"
        username: "{{ vcenter_username }}"
        password: "{{ vcenter_password }}"
        validate_certs: "{{ vcenter_validate_certs }}"
        datacenter: "{{ vcenter_datacenter }}"
        name: "{{ vm_name }}"
        disk:
          - size_gb: "{{ vm_disk_gb }}"
            type: "{{ vm_disk_type }}"
            datastore: "{{ vm_disk_datastore }}"
            state: present
            scsi_controller: "{{ vm_disk_scsi_controller }}"
            unit_number: "{{ vm_disk_scsi_unit }}"
            scsi_type: "{{ vm_disk_scsi_type }}"
            disk_mode: "{{ vm_disk_mode }}"

vars.yml

---
vcenter_hostname: "vmware.example.com"
vcenter_datacenter: "vmwaredatacenter"
vcenter_validate_certs: false
vcenter_username: "[email protected]"
vcenter_password: "MySecretPassword123"
vm_name: "myvm"
vm_disk_gb: 1
vm_disk_type: "thin"
vm_disk_datastore: "datastore"
vm_disk_scsi_controller: 1
vm_disk_scsi_unit: 1
vm_disk_scsi_type: 'paravirtual'
vm_disk_mode: 'persistent'

inventory

localhost

execution

$ ansible-playbook vm_add_disk.yml 
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit
localhost does not match 'all'
PLAY [vm disk demo] *******************************************************************************
TASK [include_vars] *******************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [add disk to vm] *****************************************************************************
changed: [localhost]
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0