Gather VMware ESX/ESXi Host Info with Ansible — Video Tutorial

How to Gather Info about all VMware ESX/ESXi Hosts in a given Cluster with Ansible? I’m going to show you a live Playbook and some simple Ansible code. I’m Luca Berton and welcome to today’s episode of Ansible Pilot Ansible Gather Info about all VMware ESX/ESXi Hosts in given Cluster - `community.vmware.vmware_host_config_info` - Gathers info about an ESXi host’s advanced configuration information Let’s talk about the Ansible module `vmware_host_config_info`. The full name is `community.vmware.vmware_host_config_info`, which means that is part of the collection of modules to interact with VMware, community-supported. The module's purpose is to gather info about an ESXi host’s advanced configuration information. Parameters - `hostname` string / port integer / username string / password string / datacenter string / validate_certs boolean — connection details - `cluster_name` string — Name of the cluster from which the ESXi host belongs to. - `esxi_hostname` string — ESXi hostname to gather information from. The following parameters are useful in order to Gather Info about all VMware ESX/ESXi Hosts in the given Cluster using the module `vmware_host_config_info`. First of all, we need to establish the connection with VMware vSphere or VMware vCenter using a plethora of self-explicative parameters: `hostname`, `port`, `username`, `password`, `datacenter` and `validate_certs`. Once the connection is successfully established you could specify the full `esxi_hostname`, the ESX/ESXi hostname, or list all the hostnames in the current cluster `cluster_name`. Links - [`community.vmware.vmware_host_config_info`](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/vmware/vmware_cluster_info_module.html) ## Playbook How to Gather Info about all VMware ESX/ESXi Hosts in given Cluster with Ansible. I’m going to show you how to Gather Information on all the ESX/ESXi Host in the current VMware “production” cluster using Ansible Playbook. code - host_info_cluser.yml ```yaml --- - name: host in cluster info Playbook hosts: localhost become: false gather_facts: false collections: - community.vmware pre_tasks: - include_vars: vars.yml tasks: - name: Gather info about all ESXi Host in given Cluster community.vmware.vmware_host_config_info: hostname: '{{ vcenter_hostname }}' username: '{{ vcenter_username }}' password: '{{ vcenter_password }}' validate_certs: "{{ vcenter_validate_certs }}" cluster_name: "{{ cluster_name }}" register: cluster_info - name: print cluster info ansible.builtin.debug: var: cluster_info ``` - vars.yml ```yaml --- vcenter_hostname: "vmware.example.com" vcenter_datacenter: "vmwaredatacenter" vcenter_validate_certs: false vcenter_username: "username@vsphere.local" vcenter_password: "MySecretPassword123" cluster_name: "production" ``` execution ```bash $ ansible-playbook cluster_info.yml PLAY [cluster info Playbook] ****