vsphere_guest only supports vcenter?

Archives Ansible Developer
1

Hey All,

I was playing around with the vsphere_guest module today and it appears that it only supports creating VMs if the ESXi host is actually joined to vcenter. I don’t think that this is a limitation of pysphere. At least one of the reasons for it not working seems to be a requirement for passing a Datacenter string to the module. This wouldn’t exist on a standalone ESXi host that wasn’t joined to a vcenter system.

I guess I have two questions:

  1. Am I correct in my findings that standalone ESXi hosts aren’t supported?
  2. Is this a by-design thing? Or could I work on the module to add ESXi support and submit a pull request? I’d be more than willing to do the work if it was welcome.

Nathan

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2

Goal was to get vcenter going first and foremost.

I’m totally open to changes to make it support raw ESX, that would be quite welcome!

3

Cool! I’ll get working on that.

On a related note, do you think there would be any demand for a hyper-v module? I’d be willing to start work on that if there isn’t already development being done on it.

Nathan

4

Hi there,

Just found this thread and I wonder whether this raw esx modules is already in place, if so, where can I find further details?

Thanks so much

5

i've used it with ESXI, for some options you just have to use a
default resource when it is vcenter specific.

6

Cool! I was able to run some commands:

`

7

HI!

Could you give an example on how to create vm on just esxi , without a vcenter.

All my attempts have failed this far.

Regards
Alland

8

Hi all,

Does anyone have any example of creating vm and/or cloning a VM with the ESXi free version (without vcenter) using Ansible?

Thanks so much for your help.

Regards,
Alex

9

Hello Alex,

i was searching for a solution to the same problem you’re facing. I finally made it, i got a running vm. Here i provide the steps i think are necessary.

  1. Make sure you can login to your ESXI with ssh:
    `

    ssh root@esxi.default.de

    `

  2. Create inventory file containing ESXI Host (replace esxi.default.de with your esxi hostname):
    `

    cat inventory

    [esxi]
    esxi.default.de

    `

  3. Make sure you maintained the ESXI Hostname in vsphere client (navigate to Configuration → DNS and Routing → Change (link in the top right) → set here hostname and domain

  4. Create a playbook like this (Credit to Michael Hampton and user3796292):
    `

    cat newvm.yml

10

Hi Matthias,

This is very helpful. Thank You very much for the detailed instruction.

Regards,
Alex

11

I can confirm this ansible playbook works! I struggled for a few days trying to figure out how to bypass vcenter and couldn’t tell from the raw python on git if it was required. I was able to create a vm just now. Thank you for the post and directions. Especially the DNS part because mine was wrong.