Ansible module for vRA

[Ivan Pacheco]

I'm looking for an ansible module to work with vRA similary to the one to work with vCenter, but so far I'm unable to find any official module. Basically be able to provision VMs and execute tasks over them, shutdown, clone, etc.

[Sebastien Desbois]

Well for me, vRA (vRealize Automation) and Ansible are doing the same job.

vRA is here to automate the provisoning of whole platforms, from VMs deployment, network conf, to app deployment, etc... With the possibility to have a portal to propose users to do it based on blueprints.

Ansible module for VMware is, in my opinion, the free / open-source alternative to vRA, (without the buit-in portal)

An Ansible module for vRA is a bit of nonsense and I don't think will be available.

[Ivan Pacheco]

Got your point, but we rely heavily on vCenter automation using ansible and would like to continue doing so, that's why a vRA module make sense for us, to abstract all the vRA REST API logic into simple ansible role/playbook. 

What is the industry approach at automating VM provisioning with vRA without someone triggering the blueprints from the portal. 

[Luis Bonilla]

Hey Ivan,

Did you find something? I found this today while searching for an Ansible module that will request base OS blueprints from VRA. Let me know.

https://github.com/LinuxArchitects/Ansible-VMware-vRealize-Automation

[Olivier Contant]

I noticed this and we developed a playbook using the same technic used by LinuxArchitects.  Unfortunately, it makes a playbook very loaded which goes against the philosophy of Ansible to keep playbook light and easy to read. By example, having to manage the bearer token instead of abstracting it or dealing with the restapi headers and so on.  

I would really like to see an Ansible module that abstract all the non essential and allow to extract the catalogs items and blueprint to generate template that we can fill with variables.  That would make it much easier to work with VRA. 

I don't know about how much effort would be required.  I would be happy to contribute financially on a Github project which can deliver it.

Regards,