I’ve been excited for weeks now as I prepped for VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas and anticipating being able to talk more about leveraging Ansible to deploy and operate a VMware SDDC environment. As you can tell from my recent posts, I am heavily involved in automation using Ansible, both within my side projects and as a practicing architect at VMware. As an internal team, we are working hard to improve and enhance several of the upstream Ansible modules, and I hope to be able to share those externally in the future as they are contributed back.
In my spare time, I’ve been working the lab to provide a set of Ansible roles that anyone can leverage to configure ESXi hosts, deploy and configure a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), and deploy and configure NSX-v within their environments. I am happy to announce the initial release of these roles in the Virtual Elephant GitHub space.
The following roles have been published within the space and are operational:
- esxi-adv-settings – Configure advanced ESXi settings on an ESXi node
- esxi-host-config – Configure DNS, hostname and NTP settings on an ESXi node
- esxi-services – Configure ESXi services on an ESXi node
- esxi-vmk-interfaces – Create/delete VMkernel interfaces on an ESXi node
- nsxv-cluster-prep – Prepare vCenter cluster for NSX-v
- nsxv-controllers – Create/delete NSX-v controllers
- nsxv-license – Assign NSX-v license
- nsxv-logical-switch – Create/delete NSX-v logical switch
- nsxv-manager-config – Configure NSX-v Manager
- nsxv-manager-deploy – Deploy NSX-v Manager OVA to vCenter Server
- nsxv-manager-roles – Configure NSX-v Manager user roles
- nsxv-transport-zone – Create/delete NSX-v transport zone
- vcenter-add-hosts – Add or remove ESXi nodes to vCenter Server
- vcenter-cluster – Create/delete/modify vCenter cluster
- vcenter-datacenter – Create/delete vCenter datacenter object
- vcenter-maintenance-mode – Manage the maintenance mode state of an ESXi node
- vcenter-networking – Create/delete DVS
- vcenter-portgroups – Create/delete port groups
Wherever possible, each role has been written to allow the creation, deletion or modification of said objects within the SDDC environment.
In addition to the roles themselves, there are published playbooks that execute the roles in a specific order, based on dependencies, to perform the actual deployment of the SDDC environment.
- esxi_sddc_configure.yml – Configure ESXi nodes
- nsxv_sddc_deploy – Deploy and configure NSX-v Manager and controllers
If you are looking to start leveraging Ansible to deploy and manage your VMware SDDC environments, these roles are a great starting point. Reach out to me over Twitter, or come find me this afternoon in the VMware {code} Theatre at 1:00PM.
Enjoy!