Ansible Vmware Inventory Plugin
This might be OT, but it is CentOS related. I’ve been running Ansible on C7 for a handful of months now, and updated to 2.4 as soon as it was available. I’ve been building inventories by hand in that time (mostly due to the fact we had no actual documentation on the managed external customer servers). However, as we have a multiple VMware clusters, thought it might be time to tinker with dynamic inventories. The problem is that the vmware_inventory.py script didn’t come with 2.4 in CentOS 7, even though it’s in the stable branch. I’m curious, is this a deliberate omission on the CentOS maintainers part? I couldn’t find a package that included it.
Am I missing something obvious?
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Mark Haney Network Engineer at NeoNova
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mark.haney@neonova.net www.neonova.net
4 thoughts on - Ansible Vmware Inventory Plugin
Both the Fedora package and the vendor’s package build script rely on
“setup.py install” to install the majority of packaged files, and Ansible’s setup.py doesn’t appear to do anything with the contrib directory, where the dynamic inventory scripts live. It doesn’t look like the decision to omit those files was made by downstream packagers.
My understanding is that those scripts are intended to be modified to fit the environment where they’re used. It *might* be useful to include them as “documentation” in the rpm package, but that doesn’t seem like it would save much over making them available via the source repository.
If you are talking about this Ansible:
https://git.CentOS.org/summary/rpms!ansible
Then that is as provided by Red Hat for RHEL-7 Extras. We (I) don’t make any changes to the source code, it is built source code as released for RHEL.
As to why the do things or do not do things, I have no idea.
Yeah, it’s the Extras repo Ansible package. So, my next (probably stupid)
question, is there a way to get the vmware_inventory plugin setup on my system?
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There are useful examples here:
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/intro_dynamic_inventory.html
Basically, download the vmware_inventory py and ini files, currently:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/devel/contrib/inventory/vmware_inventory.py https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/devel/contrib/inventory/vmware_inventory.ini
Save them wherever you normally keep your inventory. Mark the py file executable. Customize it if necessary. Indicate that it should be used, with the “-i” flag to ansible-playbook.