I am in the process of testing the use of execution environments to eventually transition my environment into using ansible-navigator. I’ve noticed an unexpected behavior regarding my execution environment and the vmware.vmware.vms dynamic inventory plugin. I notice that it takes my execution environment about 9x more time to generate the dynamic inventory compared to using ansible-inventory without the execution environment.
Has anyone else experienced this?
I’ve tried to test as close to apples-to-apples as I can. Below are the parameters of my tests. My initial guess is that there may be something with how networking works with the execution environment container that’s adding some kind of non-trivial latency.
I have two VMs. Both are RHEL 9.5. VM1 has Ansible core installed from PyPi. VM2 has Ansible Navigator installed from PyPi with an execution environment built from Fedora 41. I intended to use RHEL UBI 9 as the base for the execution environment, but the current Ansible Navigator doesn’t like that, but that’s an issue for another day 
.
Results according to time
Using an execution environment.
time ansible-navigator inventory -i vmware_vms.yml --graph -m stdout
real 18m24.069s
user 0m1.259s
sys 0m0.758s
Without an execution environment.
time ansible-inventory -i vmware_vms.yml --graph
real 2m32.579s
user 0m42.744s
sys 0m4.594s
The dynamic inventory configuration:
[me@both-vms ansible]$ cat vmware_vms.yml
---
plugin: vmware.vmware.vms
strict: true
hostname: fqdn.of.vcenter
username: the_vcenter_user
password: vault-encrypted_vcenter_password
validate_certs: False
filters:
- "tags['urn:vmomi:InventoryServiceTag:THEUUID:GLOBAL'] is not defined"
hostnames:
- "name"
properties:
- "name"
- "guest.ipAddress"
keyed_groups: []
gather_tags: True
groups:
datacenter1: "'/datacenter1' in path"
datacenter2: "'/datacenter2' in path"
datacenter3: "'/datacenter3' in path"
...
Ansible information from the execution environment:
[me@VM2 ansible]$ podman run -it fqdn.to.ee:v0.1 ansible --version
ansible [core 2.18.4]
config file = None
configured module search path = ['/runner/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
ansible python module location = /usr/local/lib/python3.13/site-packages/ansible
ansible collection location = /runner/.ansible/collections:/usr/share/ansible/collections
executable location = /usr/local/bin/ansible
python version = 3.13.2 (main, Feb 4 2025, 00:00:00) [GCC 14.2.1 20250110 (Red Hat 14.2.1-7)] (/usr/bin/python3.13)
jinja version = 3.1.6
libyaml = True
Ansible information for VM1 that’s not using the execution environment:
[me@VM1 ansible]$ ansible --version
ansible [core 2.18.5]
config file = /home/me/ansible/ansible.cfg
configured module search path = ['/home/me/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
ansible python module location = /opt/venv-ansible/lib64/python3.12/site-packages/ansible
ansible collection location = /home/me/ansible/collections
executable location = /opt/venv-ansible/bin/ansible
python version = 3.12.5 (main, Apr 2 2025, 00:00:00) [GCC 11.5.0 20240719 (Red Hat 11.5.0-5)] (/opt/venv-ansible/bin/python3.12)
jinja version = 3.1.6
libyaml = True
The execution-environment.yml file used to build the execution environment:
---
version: 3
images:
base_image:
name: quay.io/fedora/fedora-minimal:41-x86_64
dependencies:
python_interpreter:
package_system: "python3"
python_path: "/usr/bin/python3.13"
ansible_core:
package_pip: ansible-core
ansible_runner:
package_pip: ansible-runner
galaxy:
collections:
- name: ansible.utils
- name: ansible.posix
- name: ansible.windows
- name: community.crypto
- name: community.general
- name: community.vmware
- name: community.windows
- name: microsoft.ad
- name: vmware.vmware
system:
- git-core
- sshpass
additional_build_steps:
append_final:
- LABEL org.opencontainers.image.source=https://fqdn.to.my.ansible.repo
- LABEL org.opencontainers.image.description="My descripition"
...