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About Luca Berton

Luca Berton is an Ansible automation expert, author of "Ansible for VMware by Examples" and "Ansible for Kubernetes by Example" published by Apress, and creator of the Ansible Pilot YouTube channel. He shares practical automation knowledge through tutorials, books, and video courses to help IT professionals and DevOps engineers master infrastructure automation.

Ansible troubleshooting - VMware Unknown error while connecting to vCenter or ESXi

By Luca Berton · Published 2024-01-01 · Category: troubleshooting

Let’s troubleshoot together the Ansible fatal error “Unknown error while connecting to vCenter or ESXi API, [Errno -2] Name or service not known” to find the root cause, misspelled hostname in your Ansible Playbook, a connection problem connecting eventually using a secure VPN connection and successfully run our Ansible For VMware Playbook code.

Ansible troubleshooting - VMware Unknown error while connecting to vCenter or ESXi

Today we’re going to talk about Ansible troubleshooting, specifically about the “Unknown error while connecting to vCenter or ESXi API, [Errno -2] Name or service not known” message and enable Ansible For VMware.

This fatal error message happens when the Ansible controller is not able to connect to your VMware Infrastructure. The root cause might be a misspelled hostname in your Ansible Playbook, a connection problem connecting eventually using a secure VPN connection, or a configuration on the firewall on the target host.

I’m Luca Berton and welcome to today’s episode of Ansible Pilot.

## Playbook

How to reproduce, troubleshoot, and fix the error:

“Unknown error while connecting to vCenter or ESXi API [Errno -2] Name or service not known”

In this Playbook, I’m going to reproduce the error and fix using the correct VMware hostname and verify the network configuration on a demo machine.

Let’s suppose our infrastructure is accessible at the hostname “vmware.example.com”. Later in this Playbook, we’re going to see the misspelled “vm-ware.example.com”.

error code • vm_info.yml • vars.yml • inventory

error execution

fix code • vars.yml

fix execution

Conclusion

Now you know better how to troubleshoot the Ansible “VMware Unknown error while connecting to vCenter or ESXi” message and implement your Ansible For VMware automation.

Related Articles • Ansible Template Guide • Ansible Become Guide • Ansible Inventory Guide

Category: troubleshooting

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