New vmware.vmware collection and impact on community.vmware

You might have seen that there is a new vmware.vmware collection (the repository on GitHub is here) and wondered what this means for the existing community.vmware collection. If you haven’t seen this yet, you probably wonder now :smirk:

The new collection is maintained and supported by the Ansible cloud team, that is Red Hat, while community.vmware continues to be maintained by the community. This is similar to the relationship between amazon.aws and community.aws, in case you know those collections.

But what does this mean for community.vmware? First things first, this collection will stay! At the moment, there’s a request to include the new collection in the Ansible community package. Until this hasn’t been approved and implemented, community.vmware will just continue as if the new collection doesn’t exist.

But if the new collection is included, we shouldn’t split forces. That is, we don’t want to have modules implementing the same thing in both collections. In this case, modules that are also in vmware.vmware will be deprecated in community.vmware. Also, we will try to re-use the module utils from vmware.vmware in collection.vmware where possible. Although this would probably only happen in the first major release of community.vmware after vmware.vmware has been included in Ansible.

3 Likes

FYI vmware.vmware has been added to the Ansible Community Package 10.2.0.