Creating VMWare ESXi virtual machines with Ansible

Creating the template

This is something you’d probably customize to your own liking, but I’ll show you how I did it. I’ll be using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for the template, but depending on what OS you want the VM to run there are different ways you have to prepare the template.

Preparing the template VM

In Windows there’s a tool called sysprep which generalizes your Windows installation. This means it gets rid of all the unique ID’s (such as the SID) and gets the installation ready for cloning. This can be easily done by running the tool and checking the necessary boxes. In Linux there isn’t a built-in tool you can use to prepare the machine. In order to do this I used a script I found on github. I execute this script before cloning the machine to a template.

Clone VM to template

This part is probably one of the easiest steps in the process of automating the creation of VM’s. Creating a template based upon an VM is as easy as right-clicking the VM you want to clone and selecting Clone -> Clone to Template.. After that you just need to fill in some information about the template.

Installing Ansible

Creating the VMs is done using Ansible. This is a piece of software from Red Hat. It’s used for software provisioning, Infrastructure as Code and configuration management. In this case we’ll be using its Infrastructure as Code features.

First, we need to install Ansible. I’m using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as host for Ansible, but if you’re using a different OS you can always look at the documentation for the right instructions. But before we can install Ansible, we need to add Ansible’s repository. We can do this by executing the following commands.

sudo apt install sotware-properties-common
sudo apt-add-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt install ansible

But did the installation work?

To test if the installation was successful, we can execute the following command. It should give (more or less) the same output.

vincent@ansible-machine:~$ ansible --version
ansible 2.9.11
  config file = None
  configured module search path = ['/home/vincent/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/ansible
  executable location = /usr/local/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.8.2 (default, Jul 16 2020, 14:00:26) [GCC 9.3.0]

The tool that we’re actually going to be using ‘ansible-playbook’ is part of the ansible package so it should be installed too. If you’re not sure or you’re just as paranoid as I am you can always check it using the following command.

vincent@ansible-machine:~$ ansible-playbook --version
ansible-playbook 2.9.11
  config file = None
  configured module search path = ['/home/vincent/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/ansible
  executable location = /usr/local/bin/ansible-playbook
  python version = 3.8.2 (default, Jul 16 2020, 14:00:26) [GCC 9.3.0]

Combining the vSphere ESXi and Ansible

When you’ve gotten this far into this little tutorial you’ve created a template of a virtual machine and installed Ansible on a host. So far so good. Now we have two separate things that we want to get to communicating. Luckily for us, getting two these two to talk with each other isn’t rocket science. We will have to write a playbook, you can compare this to a list of tasks that get executed. In this playbook we’ll be using the vmware_guest module, this will connect to the ESXi host/vCenter server and do what we tell it to do.

First of all, we need to define the task that connects to the ESXi host/vCenter server. In the example below you have to replace the host_ip, host_user and host_pass with the correct information (ESXi/vCenter IP, username and password). I’ve added the ‘valdiate_certs: False’ line because I didn’t want to bother about installing the certificates of my own vCenter on the Ansible host. If you do want to validate the certificates, you’ll have to install the certificates.

- name: Create VM based on Template
  vmware_guest:
    hostname: "host_ip"
    username: "host_user"
    password: "host_pass"
    validate_certs: False

Now that we have connection to the our ESXi/vCenter it’s time to create the VM we can create the VM itself. This is done by defining a name and the template where you want to base the VM upon. You also have to define the datacenter when you’re using a vCenter as target host. The folder parameter defines where the VM will be located. This starts with ‘/datacenter-name/vm/’ when you’re using vCenter and with ‘/vm/’ when you’re just using an ESXi. The cluster option is also only needed when working with a vCenter as target.

name: WEB-01
template: AWX-Template
datacenter: "Lab"
folder: /Lab/vm/
state: poweredon
cluster: "esx-host-1" # Only when using vCenter

So, we’ve got a task that just creates a VM, it’s time to step it up a notch. With vCenter, you can customize the installation meaning you can change the hostname, ip address, gateway,.. as you can see in the example below. Note that this only when your target is a vCenter.

networks:
  - name: VM Network # Portgroup name
    type: static # Set static IP
    start_connected: true # Connect this adapter when the VM starts
    ip: 10.0.0.2 # Static IP
    netmask: 255.255.255.0 # Netmaks (/24 in this case) of the network
    gateway: 10.0.0.1 # Default gateway of the adapted
customization:
  domain: lab.local # DNS domainname
  dns_servers: # List of DNS servers
    - 8.8.8.8
    - 8.8.4.4
wait_for_ip_address: yes # Wait for the ip address changes before continuing
wait_for_customization: yes # Wait for customization changes before continuing

Putting this all together you get a playbook like the one below. While this is still just scratching the surface of what you can do with Ansible and the vmware_guest module, it’s a good way to get started.

- name: Create VM based on Template
  vmware_guest:
    hostname: "host_ip"
    username: "host_user"
    password: "host_pass"
    validate_certs: False
    name: WEB-02
    template: AWX-Template
    datacenter: "Lab"
    folder: /Lab/vm/
    state: poweredon
    cluster: "esx-host-1"
    networks:
      - name: VM Network
        type: static
        start_connected: true
        ip: 10.0.0.2
        netmask: 255.255.255.0
        gateway: 10.0.0.1
    customization:
      domain: lab.local
      dns_servers:
        - 8.8.8.8
        - 8.8.4.4
    wait_for_ip_address: yes
    wait_for_customization: yes

What’s next?

Well, Ansible is actually a really smart tool, it even allows you to loop through a list of variables. So maybe the next thing to do is create multiple VM’s from a dictionary variable in Ansible? The options are almost endless!

Conclusion

Creating VM’s using Ansible is actually not that hard. Combined with some logic that Ansible offers you can really create some seriously cool playbooks with this. Ansible’s power doesn’t stop with creating a VM. You can do so much more with it, like configure the freshly created VM’s to host a load balanced webserver or so. Let your creativity go lose.