Clone VMs on vSphere

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1

Hey,

I am currently playing around with ansible to see if this could be used for us in production with our deployments. Something I am currently have trouble wrapping my head around is the following.

I want to use ansible to deploy entire test invironment on the fly (tower button eventually). This would mean deploying 50ish machines to vSphere. I see you have to specify the datastore when cloning a vsphere_quest. When you dont have the most expensive version of vCenter you dont have storage pools and have to specifiy the datastore with the most free space. How would I be able to do this in ansible? I saw the vsphere_guest doesnt support wildcards in datastore names or just picks the one with the most free space if I dont specify any datastore at all. (which would be an awesome feature imho.)

I dont feel like “hardcoding” the datastore in the playbook when cloning the machines cause the environment around you won’t stand still :wink:

thnx

2

You can pass it as variable through the command line and then use a
fail task to abort unless it's been set. That's how I've done similar
things in the past.

3

Not sure if you’ve seen this blog post then, but you might find it helpful…

http://www.ansible.com/blog/managing-vmware-vsphere-guests-with-ansible-tower

Cheers!

–Mark