Gather List of VMs running on vmware esxi host

Archives Ansible Project
1

Hi All,

I’m quite new to ansible, so apologies if I’m asking an obvious question.

Is it possible for any ansible vmware module to fetch the list of VMs running on a particular vmware esxi host. Also we need to extract certain VM information of each VM (OS type, OS version, hostname., IP)

Could this be done ? If yes, could someone tell me which module to use.

Appreciate you help on this. Thank you.

2

Hi,

You can take a look at vmware_vm_info module, it will return details about all VMs, Templates in the given folder. Here is basic example -

  • name: Gather all registered virtual machines
    vmware_vm_info:
    hostname: ‘{{ vcenter_hostname }}’
    username: ‘{{ vcenter_username }}’
    password: ‘{{ vcenter_password }}’
    delegate_to: localhost
    register: vminfo

  • debug:
    var: vminfo.virtual_machines

3

Thank you Abhikeet for the quick response, Will take a look into it.

4

The VMware dynamic inventory plugin will track your running VMs, creating and updating an inventory (or list) of all VMs running in VMware: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/scenario_guides/vmware_scenarios/vmware_inventory.html

Once you have the VMs in inventory, you can use the VMware guest info module to retrieve information about the individual VMs:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/vmware_guest_info_module.html#vmware-guest-info-module

You can also reach out to the working group for VMware on Freenode IRC - the channel is #ansible-vmware.

Hope this helps,
Alicia