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About Luca Berton

Luca Berton is an Ansible automation expert, author of 8 Ansible books published by Apress and Leanpub including "Ansible for VMware by Examples" and "Ansible for Kubernetes by Example", 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.

Configure Ansible Dynamic Inventory for VMware in Simple Steps — Video Tutorial

Discover how to configure Ansible Dynamic Inventory for VMware to automate and manage virtual machines efficiently. Step-by-step guide with Playbook included.

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Tutorial summary

What you'll learn

  • Introduction
  • Ansible Dynamic Inventory for VMware
  • Links
  • Demo
  • Configuration Files
  • Listing Hosts
  • Graphing Hosts
  • Conclusion
  • Related Articles
  • Complete Inventory Configuration
Introduction This guide shows you the best way to list all the virtual machines within your VMware infrastructure using Ansible. I'll provide a live Playbook and some simple Ansible code. Welcome to today's episode of Ansible Pilot—I'm Luca Berton. Ansible Dynamic Inventory for VMware - **Functionality**: Dynamically retrieves virtual machines as inventory hosts from the VMware environment. - **Plugin**: `community.vmware.vmware_vm_inventory` - **Dependencies**: Python `pyVmomi`, `requests`, and vSphere Automation SDK The VMware dynamic inventory plugin interacts with VMware APIs to dynamically manage nodes with Ansible. The `community.vmware.vmware_vm_inventory` plugin, part of the community-supported collection, allows you to run Ansible automation across your VMware virtual machines. Links - [`community.vmware.vmware_vm_inventory`](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/vmware/vmware_vm_inventory_inventory.html) Demo Let’s configure Ansible Dynamic Inventory for VMware to list all virtual machines in your VMware infrastructure as an Ansible inventory. Configuration Files - **ansible.cfg**: ```yaml [inventory] enable_plugins = vmware_vm_inventory ``` - **inventory.vmware.yml**: ```yaml plugin: vmware_vm_inventory strict: False hostname: vmware.example.com username: username@vsphere.local password: MySecretPassword123 validate_certs: False with_tags: False groups: VMs: True ``` Listing Hosts - **Command**: ```bash $ ansible-inventory -i inventory.vmware.yml --list ``` - **Output**: ```bash { "VMs": { "hosts": [ "myvm_42254893-3793-0e4f-9f61-7c37d244c2a8" ] }, "_meta": { "hostvars": { "myvm_42254893-3793-0e4f-9f61-7c37d244c2a8": { "config": { ... }, ... } } }, "all": { "children": [ "VMs", ... ] }, ... } ``` Graphing Hosts - **Command**: ```bash $ ansible-inventory -i inventory.vmware.yml --graph ``` - **Output**: ```bash @all: |--@VMs: | |--myvm_42254893-3793-0e4f-9f61-7c37d244c2a8 |--@centos64Guest: | |--myvm_42254893-3793-0e4f-9f61-7c37d244c2a8 |--@poweredOff: | |--myvm_42254893-3793-0e4f-9f61-7c37d244c2a8 ``` [Code with ❤️ on GitHub](https://github.com/lucab85/ansible-pilot/) Conclusion Now you know how to configure Ansible Dynamic Inventory for VMware, enabling you to automate and manage your VMware virtual machines efficiently. Related Articles - [building an Ansible inventory](/articles/ansible-inventory-complete-guide) Complete Inventory Configuration ```yaml vmware_inventory.yml plugin: community.vmware.vmware_vm_inventory strict: false hostname: vcenter.example.com username: "{{ vault_vcenter_user }}" password: "{{ vault_vcenter_password }}" validate_certs: false Grou

About this tutorial

  • Author: Luca Berton
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Read time: 3 min
  • Category: installation

Topics covered

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