Ansible ending support for Vsphere ESXI free hypervisor with deprecation of vsphere_guest ?

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1

Hello,

I’ve noticed that the vsphere_guest modules that provides the ability to create/delete/manage a a guest VM through VMWARE vSphere is now deprecated.
The module advised for use current/future use is the vmware_guest module.

The vsphere_guest modules enables VMs to be created and managed with ansible on standalone ESXI servers that use the free hypervisor licence without vCenter - as used in many home/learning labs.

However, the vmware_guest module does not appear to allow VMs to be created (or indeed any write operations) on ESXI standalone server which only have the free licence and is, i believe, only really intended for use with vCentre
Therefore with deprecation of vsphere guest it would appear won’t be possible in the future to use ansible for home lab automation on a standalone esxi server without vCentre.

Note - I’ve tried migrating working vsphere_guest playbooks for creating and configuring VMs on ESXI standalone to the vmware_guest model and it does fail with the message
“Failed to create virtual machine due to product versioning restrictions: Current license or ESXi version prohibits execution of the requested operation.”

I am assuming that this is due to the underlying VMWare API used by vmware_guest that does not allow any write actions unless via vCenter.

Is anyone able to confirm the above is a correct understanding ?

Thanks,
Mike.

2

I’m getting the same message. From all the YouTube videos, it appears the speakers are using the web interface for VMWare 6.0, not 5.5 or lower. What version of ESXi are you running?

3

Did anyone get any clarity on this as i to am in the same boat and have a number of scripts that want to move over from vsphere_guest to vmware_guest but hitting the same issue. I’m using Standalone ESXi 6.0 with Free licences in home lab. But have access to a number of Free Hosts and can confirm that get same error on these builds:

VMware ESXi 6.5.0 build-5146846
VMware ESXi 6.0.0 build-2494585

If the 2 method us different API’s can we at least keep vsphere_guest as an alternative as due to licence limitations it appears that vmware_guest isnt a direct replacement in a number of lab enviroments where full ESXi licences are not used at all times. Worse case maybe rename it to standalone_esxi_guest but at least keep it as a core module.