vRealize Automation Cloud Ansible Enhancements

VMware released some Ansible enhancements within the last couple of weeks.

First is the ability to use the private IP of the deployed machine.  Prior the this fix, disabling the public IP threw and error and the deployment failed.

To disable the assignment of a pubic IP (default), simply add ‘assignPublicIpAddress: false‘ in the network properties.

Cloud_Machine_1:
  type: Cloud.Machine
  properties:
    remoteAccess:
      keyPair: id_rsa
      authentication: keyPairName
      image: CentOS 7
      flavor: generic.tiny
      attachedDisks:
        - source: '${resource.Cloud_Volume_1.id}'
      networks:
        - network: '${resource.Cloud_Network_1.id}'
          assignPublicIpAddress: false

By default, vRAC will use the private ip address of the first NIC on the machine.

Just a few things about the placement of the machines.  First my Ansible Control Host (ACH) is on a Public AWS subnet.  My first attempt to install NGINX on a machine deployed to the same subnet failed as it could not find the repo.  After some troubleshooting I determined the new machine needs to be deployed on a private subnet, with a NAT Gateway.  Oh and make sure the ACH can connect to the deployed machine on TCP port 22 (SSH).

The second was having the ability to send extra variables to the ACH.  Here the use case is to join an AWS backed Windows server to a domain using an ansible playbook.

Ansible extra variables can be added under the properties in the Ansible component.  Here I’m going to add several just to demonstrate what it looks like.

Cloud_Ansible_1:
  type: Cloud.Ansible
  properties:
    host: '${resource.Cloud_Machine_1.*}'
    osType: linux
    account: ansible-control-host
    username: centos
    privateKeyFile: /home/ansibleoss/.ssh/id_rsa
    playbooks:
    provision:
      - /home/ansibleoss/playbooks/centos-nginx/playbook.yml
    groups:
      - linux
    hostVariables:
      bluePrintName: BP- ${env.blueprintName}
      message: Hello World
      domain: corp.local
      orgUnit: ou=sample,dc=corp,dc=local
      disks:
        disk1:
          size: '${resource.Cloud_Volume_1.capacityGb}'
          label: '${input.disk1_label}'
        disk2:
          size: 20
          label: Fake disk

These variables are stored in /etc/ansible/host_vars/vra_user_host_vars.yml.

This is the resulting YAML file for this blueprint request.

They also changed the default connection type to winrm (default is SSH) if the osType is set to ‘windows’.

This will be the topic of my next article.

Stay tuned.