Vmware Esxi with Ansible

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1

Hi,

I am trying to connect esxi 6.5 with ansible. I have copied ssh keys using ssh-copy-id to root id of the esxi server but when i am executing ansible -m ping vmware(ip) it says permission denied. Any idea how to make it work out ?

192.168.119.129 | UNREACHABLE! => {
“changed”: false,
“msg”: “Failed to connect to the host via ssh: Permission denied (publickey,keyboard-interactive).\r\n”,
“unreachable”: true
}

Sudoers is not there in esxi servers… am i missing any point

2

Hmm. Well, by default ESXi hypervisors have ssh turned off. You need to manually go turn it on. Make sure ssh is running on the host. https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-6-5/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vcli.getstart.doc%2FGUID-C3A44A30-EEA5-4359-A248-D13927A94CCE.html

HTH

Greg

3

Well. after further thought…

When I did this, I used the VMware modules, like those at https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/list_of_cloud_modules.html#vmware

These require use of the VMware vSphere API Python Bindings , pyvmomi. https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi

You install pyvmomi on the machine you are running the Ansible playbooks from.

Then when you run a playbook that uses a VMware module, the playbook uses pyvmomi to connect directly to the ESXi hypervisor (or vCenter) using the VMware API. Not ssh.

The machine you run playbooks from has to have network access to the ESXi hypervisor or vCenter on the various ports that the vSphere API requires.

HTH some more.

Greg

4

Hi,

I am having below things in my Vm’s (Vmware free license)

pyvmomi installed in Ubuntu 16 where ansible also installed (192.168.119.131)
ansible 2.7
Esxi 6.5(192.168.119.129)
1 VM (Ubuntu) in vmware named as Test (192.168.119.130) whose vmware guest_facts i am finding out through UUID

My host file (Ansible)

[vmware]
192.168.119.129

My Playbook:

5

I’m new at this too. I just got my first ever playbook to run the other day.

So this is what my playbook looks like. Note that I keep my credentials for vCenter in a vault, which is NOT required.

[glporter@montara 29Aug1743Z ansible]$
rToShowSnapshots.ymlAug1743Z ansible]$cat playbooks/vmware/testPlaybookForVcenterToShowSnapshots.yml

6

So I think to answer your question, look at the top of the playbook