Using Ansible with vCenter and SSH calls

Can't believe it took me so long to explore Ansible for configuration management and automation.

I heard about it back in 2014 and tested against it since we used it to install our micro services framework. 

I used a good intro video tutorial to try making a vCenter connection and listing hosts.

Problems encountered were the YAML syntax, using local versus remote connections, SSH with sudo, small syntax errors and using the ansible.cfg and hosts file under /etc/ansible, which I created manually

Initial vCenter Tests:

Here's some initial code for connecting to vCenter:

cat auth_vcenter.yml
---
  - hosts: localhost
    vars:
      user_readme: 'Welcome to vCenter tests'
    tasks:
    - debug:
        msg: "Starting test aginst vcenter"
    - name: Including Secret Environment Items
      include_vars:
        file: secret67.yml
        name: secret
    - name: vcenter login
      uri:
        url: "https://{{secret.vcenter}}/rest/com/vmware/cis/session"
        force_basic_auth: yes
        method: POST
        user: "{{secret.username}}"
        password: "{{secret.password}}"
        status_code: 200
        validate_certs: no
      register: login
    - name: Get hosts from vCenter
      uri:
        url: "https://{{secret.vcenter}}/rest/vcenter/host"
        force_basic_auth: yes
        validate_certs: no
        headers:
          Cookie: "{{login.set_cookie}}"
      register: vchosts
    - debug: var=login
    - debug: var=vchosts

This works with a YAML secrets file which for initial testing is fine but passwords should be encrypted so it's not a longterm solution:

cat secret67.yml
---
username: administrator@vsphere.local
password:
vcenter: 10.117.180.10

Initial SSH Tests:

Here's some other code for trying out an automated SSH connection with some initial commands

One that that got me was authentication errors so to make the login process work I had to run:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@10.117.155.123

cat testone.yml
---
  - hosts: 10.117.155.123
    vars:
      user_readme: 'Welcome to this machine!!!! Hey good!'
    tasks:
    - debug:
        msg: "Starting test against server"
    - name: List contents
      command: ls -lta
      register: out1
    - name: Touch file
      file:
        path: $HOME/test_server.txt
        state: touch
      register: out2
    - name: Create target directory
      file: path=~/testit state=directory mode=0755
      register: out3
    - name: simple file try
      copy:
        dest: ~/testit/README.txt
        content:  " {{ user_readme }} "
      register: out4
    - debug: var=out1
    - debug: var=out2
    - debug: var=out3
    - debug: var=out4

Hosts and config Files:

For the SSH testing these initial files seems to work for me. Very brief and to the point.

$ cat ansible.cfg
[defaults]
remote_user=

$ cat hosts
all:
  vars:
    ansible_ssh_user=
    ansible_ssh_pass=
  hosts:
    10.117.180.10

Summary:

To watch the video, setup Ansible on Mac, and get these tests working should take a day or two, max, in my opinion.

Next steps are to see about using Ansible for further automation testing.