Automating VM builds on XO with Redhat AAP (Ansible)

Murf

Hi.
We are migrating from vMware where we use RedHat Satellite to automate our RHEL builds.
I dont expect there to be much of any integration between XO and Satellite, however I see quite a few posts about Terraform and Ansible.
We currently use Redhat Ansible Automation Platform for patching and hardening, and would like to leverage it to build VMs on XO via ansible automation.
Are there any docs or labs on how to do this please?

bufanda

@Murf There is a blog post about using XenOrchestra for a dynamic inventory.
https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/virtops3-ansible-with-xen-orchestra/

Creating VMs is usually a job done by terraform and not ansible. I know there is an ansible collection for VMWare which can do that but as far as I know there is no collection that is able to manage VMs and sadly Satellite's virt-who doesn't seem to have XenOrchestra support at the moment and since RedHat is pushing OpenShift I don't think it will ever come.

But there was a wish for a colletion on the DevOps Megathread
https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/88993

olivierlambert

Indeed, @bufanda is right and pointing to the right direction. Thanks!

bvitnik

@bufanda said in Automating VM builds on XO with Redhat AAP (Ansible):

... as far as I know there is no collection that is able to manage VMs and sadly Satellite's virt-who doesn't seem to have XenOrchestra support at the moment and since RedHat is pushing OpenShift I don't think it will ever come.

But there was a wish for a colletion on the DevOps Megathread
https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/88993

There are Ansible modules for managing VMs in the comunity.general collection. They just don't do it through XO but through XenServer/XCP-ng hosts (or pool masters) directly, using XenAPI. Search for xenserver_* modules in Ansible documentation.

Murf

Thanks all, much appreciated

nathanael-h

Hello, I suggest you look also for Packer to build ready to use VM templates, with cloud-init, guest tools, and the softwares you'd need. There's a blog post for this https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2024/02/22/using-packer-with-xcp-ng/.