Can I manage guest VMs in vSphere free using Ansible without vCenter?

Question

Seems to me that most of the existing Ansible modules require vCenter. For example guest_module has required parameter vcenter_hostname. The question is - is there an ability to manage 2-3 vSphere hosts using Ansible? I need creating virtual environments(virtual networks, guest VMs, load balancing endpoints).

I also considered Hyper-v but it doesn't have Ansible modules. Direct powershell management considered as a last resort for Hyper-v.

Answer 1

Yes, you can do things that are allowed by free license.

There's a hint in the docs:

For standalone ESXi hosts, ha-datacenter should be used as the datacenter name

I use vsphere_guest without any problems with standalone hypervisors with the following parameters filled in:

- vsphere_guest:
    vcenter_hostname: "{{ esxi_ip_or_dns }}" # ip address of hypervisor
    esxi:
      datacenter: ha-datacenter
      hostname: "{{ esxi_hostname }}" # name shown in hypervisor console
    username: "{{ esxi_username }}"
    password: "{{ esxi_password }}"

But keep in mind, that many useful features are blocked in free license. For example, you can't clone VMs without vCenter license.