community.vmware | Ansible Collection for VMware

I am producing from VMware datastores collection a list of volumes and their associated tags

I formated them in a JSON type output to be able to feed another system later. The output is working but for the tags section I would like to keep only the name and category_name not the other properties.

This is my playbook :

One of the many Ansible Community.VMWare modules parameters is 'hostname', which is the name of the ESXi server.

In my case, a guest could be in one of multiple ESXi servers (8, for now), and also a new server could be added by the support team at any time.

Is there a way to find on which ESXi server a guest is? Or is it mandatory that I know this at start?

I could have a list of the ESXi servers, keep updating it on demand, and loop over this list using module 'community.vmware.vmware_guest_find' and "with_items", but actually, I don't know how would I do this (iterate over the servers, changing the 'hostname', and stopping when I finally find the guest).

Any help?

Background:

I'm working on some automation to be able to deploy a VM from a content library OVF template. I am able to successfully deploy the VM from the OVF template, however, when I try to apply a customization_spec template through the vmware_guest module, it doesn't change anything. The module runs, but just outputs OK instead of changed.

I found that this is also the case if I try to apply this customization_spec to a different VM that I cloned from a template through the vmware_guest module. I created a separate playbook that would solely do the customizations so there wouldn't be anything else to trip it up, and I'm working with static names and whatnot because this is some initial testing and development.

Here's the kicker though, if I clone a VM from a template using the same vmware_guest module, it will clone the VM and apply the customization_spec in the same process. The content library deployment is preferred due to the environment, but if I can't deploy a customization_spec after the fact, it kind of ruins it.

I can manually apply the VM Customization through vCenter, so I know the customization template is good, and as shown earlier, it does work when cloning a template through the vmware_guest module. I do not see it show up as a task in the vCenter, so I know it's not taking effect through the separate module. I should also note that I can use the same vmware_guest module to power on the VMs just fine, and if I combine the customization_spec line with it, it still doesn't initiate the guest customization within vCenter. Am I missing something in the module to force it to take effect?

Scrubbed code:

Cloning from a template - Customization works

Im trying to get the clustername, datastore cluster, port groups, and some other facts from vcenter using ansible. I've read the docs here but the data Im getting in return is almost too much and needs to be filtered. Here's an example of the clustername playbook. It works, but Im looking to get just the name of the cluster. Im outputting it to a yaml file so I can import it into a pipeline later. Here's the code.

I'm having hard time trying to figure it out what I'm doing wrong with my Ansible playbook.

I've got a bunch of tasks, which define or not some variables according to context, depending of the result, some task will be ignored or not.

For this specific case, I check if a VlanID already exists, if it doesn't then I create one, and retrieve the new VlanID from the result.

Here is the playbook :

I wrote 2 Ansible playbooks to create and destroy a vm inside an ESXi instance.

The create task is:

I've read lots of Ansible documentation on the modules and plugins for VMWare, but I still can't find a way to do what I think should be relatively simple. I'm looking to take a vCenter and extract the inventory tree, so I know all the datacenters in the vCenter, which clusters are in each datacenter and which VMs are in each cluster, but I can't seem to find a way to do this.

I'm looking to gather and collate information about every VM on a vCenter, which I can almost do with the dynamic inventory plugin community.vmware.vmware_vm_inventory. However, none of the data it gathers about each VM seems to include the datacenter and cluster each VM is in.

Some of the VMWare modules require that you specify the datacenter or cluster a VM is in, so without this information, one cannot fully manage a vCenter. One would still need an external source of information in order to be able to convert a whole vCenter to a desired state.

Am I missing something? Is there some way to get the inventory tree structure that the vSphere web client provides, using the VMWare modules and plugins in Ansible?

I try to execute this ansible yml file to get vm info in vsphere,

I have two files:

hosts file: