Using Ansible on cloned VMs?

[Victor_Hooi]

We have a small VM cluster we use for testing (Proxmox, with KVM VMs).

We’ve created a library of KVM templates, that users can clone to new VMs.

Each clone has a unique MAC address, and SMBIOS ID, but is otherwise identical.

My question is - is there any way of using Ansible to manage the machines, without needing to manually setup Ansible on each one?

For example - can we install Ansible in the base image, and somehow have it identify itself based on MAC/SMBIOS, and check-in to the central server that way?

[Antony_Stone]

You seem to be thinking of Puppet - that has a client on the target machine
which pulls its config from the master.

Ansible is a push mechanism where the Ansible server connects out to the
target machines and configures them.

So, yes, what you want to do is certainly achievable - the machine running
Ansible just needs to know about the VMs you want to manage.

Antony.