benefit of Dynamic Inventory over static inventory

Archives Ansible Project
1

Brian

I have written dynamic inventory scripts https://dpaste.de/1mVa . But I
dont get whats the benefit of using dynamic inventory. I still had to list
all the things which I used in static inventory. could you tell me in what
way I can get most out of dynamic inventory. In what ways It is better to
use, right now I dont think so
Brian Coca <bcoca@ansible.com>: Nov 28 10:38AM -0500

Well, dynamic inventories make sense when you have an external source
(cloud provider, vm system, db, inventory system, ldap, etc) not when
you are just listing the hosts manually. If that is the case just
stick with the ini format.

Thank you a lot. Petty good answer and it make sense now as I had the
same problem.

Was wondering, have you been able to retrieve a list of hosts' IPs
given a list of vmware IPs? I have struggled with this a lot and the
fact that dynamic inventory is designed for such case mean there is a
way, just haven't found it

Would be great to share

William

2

there is actually an existing inventory script for vmware/vcenter, in
the repo at plugins/inventory/vmware.py, check your ansible
installation for the file and set it up as your inventory. You can
also copy the vmware.ini in the same directory as an example for
setting it up.

3

I've made some VMware inventory updates that will become a PR once I get
tags working. It includes a change to define ansible_ssh_host for running
VMs.

You can give it a try from my branch in the meantime:

https://github.com/cchurch/ansible/blob/vmware_inventory_improvements/plugins/inventory/vmware.py