WARNING -- I no longer work with vsphere. I will continue to accept pull requests and try to code review them by eye, but nothing is getting tested by me directly. I don't have a lot of time to answer to many questions and its really difficult for me to give examples of things that I have not actually done myself.

ansible-vsphere

Ansible module to automate the vsphere api.

This module uses the official VMWare python library https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi. Current supported features:

1. Power on, Guest Shutdown, Power off VMs
2. Create, Delete, Clone VMs
3. Upgrade VMWare Tools
4. Create, Delete, Revert VM Snapshots
5. Using the Guest Operations Manager

The module takes a special spec object that will be converted to the correct vsphere object during processing of the task. The spec object has two top level parameters: type: The type of spec ( such as VirtualMachineCloneSpec ) In some cases this could be the name of a function that will be called. value: A representation of the values that fill out the spec object. In the case of the spec being used to specify a function being called, the values should be the parameters that get passed to the function.

In order to fill spec objects with other spec objects, the values will be put through a recursive update, that will convert any key that is an attribute of the vim module of pyVmomi. The update process can even substitute Managed Object References through the special syntax. { "ManagedObjectReference" : { "type": "MOR TYPE", "name" : "MOR NAME" } }

For example below is how to clone a VM. The type VirtualMachineCloneSpec corresponds directly to the definition at http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.wssdk.apiref.doc%2Fvim.vm.CloneSpec.html

- name: Clone VM
  local_action:
    module: vsphere
    host: "{{ vcenter_host }}"
    login: "{{ vcenter_login }}"
    password: "{{ vcenter_password }}"
    timeout: 60
    guest:
      name: "{{ deleteme }}"
      state: present
      folder: "{{ folder }}"
      clone_from: base-tmpl
    spec:
      type: VirtualMachineCloneSpec
      value:
        config:
          VirtualMachineConfigSpec:
            name: "{{ deleteme }}"
            memoryMB: 2048
            numCPUs: 1
            deviceChange: []
        location:
          VirtualMachineRelocateSpec:
            pool:
              ManagedObjectReference:
                type: ResourcePool
                name: Resources
        powerOn: False
        template: False