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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.

Start a VMware vSphere Virtual Machine - Ansible module vmware_guest_powerstate — Video Tutorial

How to automate the change of power state from Powered Off to Powered On of the virtual machine guest “myvm” using Ansible Playbook and vmware_guest_powerstate module.

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How to Start a VMware vSphere Virtual Machine 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 Start a VMware vSphere Virtual Machine - `community.vmware.vmware_guest_powerstate` - Manages power states of virtual machines in vCenter Let's talk about the Ansible module `vmware_guest_powerstate`. The full name is `community.vmware.vmware_guest_powerstate`, which means that is part of the collection of modules to interact with VMware, community-supported. Manages power states of virtual machines in vCenter. Parameters - hostname string / username string / password string / datacenter string / validate_certs boolean - connection details - state string - present / powered-off / powered-on / reboot-guest / restarted / shutdown-guest / suspended - force boolean - no/yes - answer string - A list of questions to answer, should one or more arise while waiting for the task to be complete. The following parameters are useful in order to Start a VMware vSphere Virtual Machine using the module `vmware_guest_powerstate`. 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 power state, in this case, "powered-on". You could also force the power state change using the `force` parameter, default disabled. You could also specify the reply to some `answer` that could arise while waiting for the task to complete. Some common uses are to allow a cdrom to be changed even if locked or to answer the question as to whether a VM was copied or moved. Links - [community.vmware.vmware_guest_powerstate](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/vmware/vmware_guest_powerstate_module.html) ## Playbook How to Start a VMware vSphere Virtual Machine with Ansible. I'm going to show you how to start the Virtual Machine named "myvm" from the power state "Powered Off" to the power state "Powered On" using Ansible Playbook. code - vm_start.yml ```yaml --- - name: start vm Playbook hosts: localhost become: false gather_facts: false collections: - community.vmware pre_tasks: - include_vars: vars.yml tasks: - name: power on vmware_guest_powerstate: hostname: "{{ vcenter_hostname }}" username: "{{ vcenter_username }}" password: "{{ vcenter_password }}" name: "{{ vm_name }}" validate_certs: "{{ vcenter_validate_certs }}" state: powered-on ``` - vars.yml ```yaml --- vcenter_hostname: "vmware.example.com" vcenter_datacenter: "vmwaredatacenter" vcenter_validate_certs: false vcenter_username: "username@vsphere.local" vcenter_password: "MySecretPassword123" vm_name: "myvm" ``` - inventory ```ini localhost ``` execution ```bash $ ansible-playbook

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