Ansible VMWare ESXi Guest VM launch using template

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1

First I will admit that I am not an exprt on VMWare ESXi. And facing issue while automating launch of preconfigured servers using Ansible.

I want to launch a VM using template in VMWare ESXi server 5. I have created a template from an existing VM (.ova file). And now I am trying to launch it using Ansible VMWare_guest module. What I find confusing is the part where you provide path to the template file. Wouldn’t it be easier to launch if template is stored in datastore!?

My Ansible task as follows, which gets a VM up & running for me with CentOS 7ISO file loaded then I proceed to install CentOS manually by taking console access of VM.

  • vsphere_guest:
    vcenter_hostname: 172.xxx.x.xxx
    username: xxxx
    password: xxxxxx
    guest: test-1
    state: powered_on
    force: yes
    vm_disk:
    disk1:
    size_gb: 50
    type: thin
    datastore: datastore1
    vm_nic:
    nic1:
    type: vmxnet3
    network: VM Network
    network_type: standard
    vm_hardware:
    memory_mb: 4096
    num_cpus: 2
    osid: centos64Guest
    scsi: paravirtual
    vm_cdrom:
    type: iso
    iso_path: “datastore1/CentOS_iso/CentOS-7-x86_64-Everything.iso”
    state: reconfigured
    esxi:
    datacenter: ha-datacenter
    hostname: “172”

What I want to achieve is to launch a VM with preinstalled OS & Preconfigured hardware configuration. I have wrote another ansible task for this which will use template to achieve this feat.

2

Hi,

I am new to this also, but do have a working play that deploys from a template… although i am using a different module, vmware_guest, my understanding is that the vsphere_guest is very limited and vmware_guest is the newer…