What you need to know about VMware Automation with Red Hat Ansible

You need to learn how to automate your VMware infrastructure with Ansible!  This is an extremely common use-case for numerous customers across many different verticals.  Ansible is well known for automating Linux and Windows operating systems, but it can also automate VMware vSphere itself, allowing you to automate and orchestrate an entire virtual machine lifecycle. In this blog, we’ll explore how Ansible can automate virtual machine lifecycles, how this fits into the wider hybrid cloud environment, and next steps to take to learn more.

Automating the Virtual Machine Lifecycle

Ansible isn’t just for OS-level tasks; it can orchestrate the entire lifecycle of VMware virtual machines.

From provisioning and configuration to scaling and decommissioning, Ansible streamlines operations. You may ask yourself what are the benefits of this? While there are three main ones:

• Consistency: Manual processes introduce errors. Ansible ensures uniform configurations across VMs.
• Efficiency: Save time by automating repetitive tasks like VM creation, patching, and scaling.
• Scalability: Ansible adapts seamlessly as your VMware environment grows.

In fact, when you combine the disparate types of automation you can look at a workflow like this:

Let’s break this down even further.  Each step in the diagram above, at its most basic level, can be a simple 1-task Ansible Playbook.  It doesn’t need to be over complicated: 

In the above diagram we can (1) deploy a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 virtual machine on to VMware vSphere, then (2) we can configure our application, then (3) we can add this new fully functional web server into our F5 appliance to have it add to our server capacity.  Simple disparate playbooks can be connected into an Ansible Automation Platform workflow to create easy automation orchestration.

Multi-cloud automation

I also want to talk about the reality of most organizations and why a tool like Ansible Automation Platform is so incredibly important.  No customer is completely homogenous and all in one only one virtualization platform. Organizations operate in a multi-cloud world—private clouds, public clouds, and everything in between. This can lead to tech debt and tech sprawl, and be overwhelming on how you can actually tame the complexity of your multi-cloud environments.

Ansible bridges the gap, allowing VMware and hyperscaler environments to coexist harmoniously. Through unified orchestration, Ansible’s vast ecosystem of integrations enables consistent orchestration across diverse cloud platforms. Whether it’s AWS, Azure, OpenShift Virt or your on-premises VMware setup, Ansible can coordinate and help migrate workloads across your hybrid cloud.

How do I get started?

Check out the VMware Validated Content Collection on Automation Hub: cloud.vmware_ops.  Ansible validated content is a new set of collections containing pre-built YAML content (such as playbooks or roles) to address the most common automation use cases.  Ansible validated content’s opinionated approach to what foundational use cases you should focus on first.

Next steps: VMware Explore

We are super excited to announce on August 26-29, 2024 that we will be at VMware Explore at the Venetian Conference Center! This is my first VMware explore event and I am super excited to chat with engineers about automation for everything.  Whether you are automating virtual machines, network equipment, public clouds or VMware vSphere we would love to chat with you.  We will also be having four great mini-theatre sessions in our booth.  Mini theater sessions are 10-15 minute presentations that you can attend at our booth and learn how to get started and how we can integrate with your existing infrastructure.  Our four talk are:

• 5 Great use-cases to automate your VMware infrastructure efficiently
  Automation is essential for managing complex infrastructure efficiently. Ansible Automation Platform offers a powerful solution for automating VMware environments. In this talk, we’ll explore five compelling use-cases where Ansible can transform your VMware infrastructure and help you automate and manage your Linux and Windows virtual machines.

   

• Multi-cloud automation with Ansible Automation Platform
  Numerous organizations are using a mix of private and public clouds for their IT infrastructure demands.  In this talk we will showcase how Ansible Automation Platform can help automate, orchestrate and manage your VMware infrastructure as well as your hyperscaler infrastructure and allow them to seamlessly co-exist.  Many tools have promised a seamless hybrid cloud experience, but Ansible’s vast ecosystem of integrations can finally deliver on.

   

• Multi-cloud automation with Ansible Automation Platform
  Numerous organizations are using a mix of private and public clouds for their IT infrastructure demands.  In this talk we will showcase how Ansible Automation Platform can help automate, orchestrate and manage your VMware infrastructure as well as your hyperscaler infrastructure and allow them to seamlessly co-exist.  Many tools have promised a seamless hybrid cloud experience, but Ansible’s vast ecosystem of integrations can finally deliver on.

  Basics: Set up Ansible and create your first playbook.

  • Inventory: Efficiently manage VMware inventory.
  • Modules: Understand and learn how to use an Ansible module
  • Job Templates: Learn how to operationalize your Ansible Playbooks
  • Surveys: Learn how to make easy forms in a user-friendly question and answer way for your job templates

   

• How automating your VMware environments can save you time and money
  By leveraging Ansible Automation Platform, organizations can achieve more with less effort. This powerful tool allows you to automate tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, interservice orchestration, and provisioning. Specifically, when it comes to VMware infrastructure, Ansible enables you to automate ESXi installations, configurations, network setups, and more. By doing so, you’ll save time, reduce manual errors, and ensure a consistent and repeatable process for infrastructure provisioning.

How to find us at VMware Explore!

We will be right near the entrance to the exposition hall at the Red Hat booth.  The Red Hat booth is #1530 in the event app.  If you have any trouble finding us, message Roger Lopez or myself on the social media platform of your choice! 

You can also follow @RedHatEvents and @Ansible to get the latest updates, as well as subscribe to our YouTube Channel.

We will also be at more events this year!  For example there will be Ansible experts at AWS re:Invent 2024!