Hello,
I have configured a Service Catalog Item to trigger VM deployment via Ansible playbook. I see that in provisioned service there is a VMs section. Would it be possible to add provisioned machine to service from ansible?
Is anybody using Ansible Playbooks provisioning vs Automation State Machines/Ruby?
It seems like even Red Hat representatives advise to use more Ansible vs ruby as it’s more portable.
Thanks in advance,
Anton
Hi
Yes you can associate a newly provisioned VM (provisioned using embedded Ansible) with the service, using the Ansible manageiq_vmdb role, as follows:
tasks:
- name: Get the service object
manageiq_vmdb:
href: "{{ manageiq.service }}"
register: service
- name: Get the VM object
manageiq_vmdb:
href: "vms/18"
register: vm
- name: Add the VM to the service
manageiq_vmdb:
vmdb: "{{ service }}"
action: add_resource
data:
resource:
href: "{{ vm.href }}"
The challenge is to get the new VM’s object id (in that example VMS/18). For this you need to trigger a provider refresh via the API and detect the new VM. There’s an example of doing that in the following playbook (note that playbook hard-codes the provider_id to “21000000000002” - yours will almost certainly be different):
Regarding the Ruby versus Ansible argument, my own personal opinion is that the out-of-the-box Ruby-based VM and service provisioning “just works”, i.e. VMs are linked into services as you’d expect, and the workflow is thoroughly tested. The advantage of Ansible is where you don’t have existing Ruby skills to modify the workflow, and Ansible/yaml is certainly easier to learn and understand than Ruby for a novice.
I’d be wary of the claim for portability though, because you still tend to need to write ManageIQ-specific playbooks, as that example shows when using the manageiq_vmdb role to link the VM to the service, finding the new VM ID, etc.
hope this helps,
pemcg
Hi @pemcg,
Thanks for information and links to examples.
As of Ruby vs Ansible, I agree with you for vm provisioning as all vmware objects are accessible internally via evm. It’s easier to manipulate the data for placement and vm tagging after deployment. For external integrations, such as Netapp, Infoblox, Cisco in our case i think it’s better to go with ansible. As it already has many modules out of the box.
Best regards,
Anton
Hi @pemcg ,
I am using following playbook
name: Get the service object
manageiq_vmdb:
href: “services/116”
register: service
name: Get the VM object
manageiq_vmdb:
href: “vms/122”
register: vm
name: Add the VM to the service
manageiq_vmdb:
vmdb: “{{ service }}”
action: add_resource
data:
resource:
href: “{{ vm.href }}”
But i keep getting error
“msg”: {
“msg”: “Request failed: <urlopen error [SSL: WRONG_VERSION_NUMBER] wrong version number (_ssl.c:897)>”,
“status”: -1,
“url”: “https://localhost:3000/api/services/116”
}
with Curl, http works but same error fir https SSL wrong version. I tried enabling,
SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 -TLSv1.1 -TLSv1.2
But still no luck. I also tried without connection details as was mentioned in role documentation but that fails and complains about missing required parameter connection details
I have tried with localhost.ssl, http also but no luck. All i want to is to add existing VMs to a service
Hi
Is this an embedded Ansible service, or a Tower/AWX Job Template service? It might also be worth trying the updated manageiq-core.manageiq-vmdb role (see ManageIQ - Embedded Ansible — Part 1, Built-In Ansible Roles)