Build a nested vSphere lab with Ansible
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.
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
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}"
docker build --tag vsphere-ansible .
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'
- 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.