vsphere-ansible-lab-builder

Build a nested vSphere lab with Ansible

Description

You can use the ansible playbooks in this repo to build out nested ESXi hosts, deploy a vCenter and configure clusters. ESXi/vCenter 6.7 and 7.0 are supported.

Dependencies

The following procedure has been developed on a debian based linux machine.
Versions:

Ansible 2.10 or higher
Linux tools apt-get install xorriso sshpass python-pip git
Python modules pip3 install pyvmomi
Install vSphere Automation SDK pip install --upgrade pip setuptools pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/vmware/vsphere-automation-sdk-python.git
ESXi OVA images
vCenter ISO

Usage

After cloneing the repo, you must update the relevant answerfile yaml to point to your ova and iso file, plus change any IP addresses or credentials.
When running for the first time you must run ./fix_dvs_for_7.sh to enable creation of VDS v7 objects.

export PARENT_VCENTER_USERNAME="administrator@vsphere.local"
export PARENT_VCENTER_PASSWORD="VMware1!"
TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d) || exit 1
echo "Temp dir is ${TMPDIR}"

# Deploy vCenter and host/s
ansible-playbook deploy.yml --extra-vars="@answerfile-minimal.yml"  --extra-vars "tmp_dir=${TMPDIR}"

with Docker

Building the vsphere-ansible Docker image

docker build --tag vsphere-ansible .

Build vSphere lab

docker run \
    --rm \
    --env PARENT_VCENTER_USERNAME='administrator@vsphere.local' \
    --env PARENT_VCENTER_PASSWORD='VMware1!' \
    --volume ${PWD}:/work \
    vsphere-ansible \
    ansible-playbook deploy.yml \
        --extra-vars '@answerfile-minimal.yml'  \
        --extra-vars 'tmp_dir=/tmp'

Known issues/future plans

The TKGS playbook is broken with vCenter 7.0U1 due to a bug with the vCenter not creating tag categories correctly.
VMs are not currently deployed into a folder or resource pool
Only local datastores are used. In the future NFS support may be added.

FlorentFlament / vsphere-ansible-lab-builder