Ansible with Xen Orchestra

hostingforyou

@shinuza thanks, that works.

after changing to api_host: "10.10.1.120:8443"

[WARNING]:  * Failed to parse /opt/system/inventories/production/xen_orchestra.yml with auto plugin: [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: IP address mismatch, certificate is not valid for '10.10.1.120'. (_ssl.c:997)

setting validate_certs: false gave me the working output

looks very nice

hostingforyou

This post is deleted!

hostingforyou

Is their a way to use the ansible plugin for creating VM's in XCP-NG?

AtaxyaNetwork

@hostingforyou Hi !

The best way to create VM is with the terraform provider for Xen Orchestra
See https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/virtops1-xen-orchestra-terraform-provider/

hostingforyou

@AtaxyaNetwork looks good, not sure to post issue here as its is not ansible related, but I get the following error:

$ terraform plan

Planning failed. Terraform encountered an error while generating this plan.

╷
│ Error: unexpected EOF
│ 
│   with provider["registry.terraform.io/terra-farm/xenorchestra"],
│   on provider.tf line 10, in provider "xenorchestra":
│   10: provider "xenorchestra" {

$ cat provider.tf 
# provider.tf
terraform {
  required_providers {
    xenorchestra = {
      source = "terra-farm/xenorchestra"
      version = "~> 0.9"
    }
  }
}
provider "xenorchestra" {
  username = "xo"
  password = "password"
  url = "ws://10.10.1.120:8443"
  insecure = true
}

$ cat vm.tf 
data "xenorchestra_pool" "pool" {
  name_label = "OTA"
}

data "xenorchestra_template" "vm_template" {
  name_label = "Ubuntu-22-template"
}

data "xenorchestra_sr" "sr" {
  name_label = "Tintri-Intern-Intern01"
  pool_id = data.xenorchestra_pool.pool.id
}

data "xenorchestra_network" "network" {
  name_label = "LAN Private"
  pool_id = data.xenorchestra_pool.pool.id
}

any idea how to debug?

Nystral

Hello all,

I'm running into a persistent issue when following the blog steps.

ansible-inventory -i ./my.xen_orchestra.yaml --list
[WARNING]:  * Failed to parse /home/cstreb/working/ansible/my.xen_orchestra.yaml with yaml plugin: Plugin configuration
YAML file, not YAML inventory
[WARNING]:  * Failed to parse /home/cstreb/working/ansible/my.xen_orchestra.yaml with ini plugin: Invalid host pattern
'plugin:' supplied, ending in ':' is not allowed, this character is reserved to provide a port.
[WARNING]: Unable to parse /home/cstreb/working/ansible/my.xen_orchestra.yaml as an inventory source
[WARNING]: No inventory was parsed, only implicit localhost is available

contents of my.xen-orchestra.yaml file is as follows

plugin: community.general.xen_orchestra
api_host: 192.168.2.203 #(XOA box?) Needs :443?
user: <user>
password: <pass>

Other relevant details
I'm using XO from source running on a different machine then my xcp-ng

This is my first time trying ansible at all so I may have missed a key step. Any help is appreciated.

EDIT: Fixed

Because I haven't forced HTTPS on my XO from Source box I needed to tell the file to configure to http (80)
then add the following arguments to the end of my file

validate_certs: false
use_ssl: false

it now works.

olivierlambert

Thanks @Nystral for your feedback!

john.c

It was once suggested to use Ansible's native generic command invoking functions, to automate and do infrastructure as code.

However people who are migrating from VMware can have a very detailed, infrastructure as code via Ansible. Also by having actual functions for invoking and setting up HA in Ansible for instance would be great. As well as other things such as managing the SRs, as well as creating and connecting them on XCP-ng hosts. So if any errors occur then it will be able to return, proper error codes appropriate to XOA and XCP-ng, rather than what is returned with the native generic Ansible command invoker.

The community has produced an extensive Ansible plugin for VMware products. So the new incoming customers may welcome a much, more extensive capabilities for Ansible when paired with XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra, beyond just Xen Orchestra inventory.

https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/repo/published/community/vmware/docs/

bvitnik

@john-c

I feel your pain, however, the main difference between VMware support in Ansible and XenServer/XCP-ng is that VMware has a whole working group with a dozen of regular members and contributors:

https://github.com/ansible/community/wiki/VMware

Major contributors are all Red Hat or VMware employees i.e. people paid to do it. There is no such thing for XenServer/XCP-ng. Citrix never showed any interest in supporting Ansible. Netscaler is the only Citrix product that has a decent Ansible support.

To help you better understand how Ansible as a project works, here are some points from my personal adventure:

To be able to contribute new modules to Ansible or any of the official collections, you need to implement extensive unit and integration tests. I understand the requirement. Ansible/Red Hat wants to maintain a high level of quality and to easily (and in automated way) detect any regressions. That's all good but implementing tests is harder and more work than implementing modules themselves. What's very very helpful in case of VMware is that there is a whole simulator called govcsim developed by VMware. You can test your modules against the simulator with ease and automate all the tests with little effort. To my knowledge, there is no simulator available for XenAPI. If such simulator does exist, it is most likely kept in secret by Citrix. If Citrix was ever to release this simulator, that would be a HUGE step forward.
If you want to contribute new modules to Ansible or any of the official collections, someone has to review your code. Not many people are willing to do so and have the power to include your code to Ansible. As a matter of fact, finding reviewers and begging them for help is the hardest thing of all. I had some tremendous luck to acquire the interest of Abhijeet Kasurde, one of the top Ansible guys, to review my code and to eventually include xenserver_guest_* modules into Ansible. The guy handles VMware in Ansible... surprise! My xenserver_guest module was included without any unit or integration tests but for other modules I had to implement them. Luckily, they were simple and I had a luck to find a reviewer for tests also. When I wanted to upgrade xenserver_guest module with new functionality, they required unit and integration tests. I eventually implemented tests for xenserver_guest module but it was a huge undertaking and the amount of code involved easily dwarfed the module itself. I basically ended up implementing a barebone XenAPI simulator. This is where I hit a road block. No one, even the people that initially supported me, wanted to review this monstrosity of test+simulator. It was never included in Ansible.
If you don't want to rely on external reviewers then you have to form a team, or if possible, a work group. That way you can review each others code and include it in Ansible without external support. Everything is pretty much handled by bots. If you gain a high enough status in Ansible project, you could get permissions to merge the code yourself without relying on anyone, not even bots. Should I mention that I failed to ever find any good Python programmer that is into Ansible and interested enough to form a team with me?
You can skip all this struggle if you just maintain you own collection of modules but then you cannot rely on existing Ansible tooling that will do all the testing, linting, sanity checks, spell checks and such. You are on your own.

After a lot of struggle I eventually lost any interest as I was wasting a lot of time and life had to go on. Not much people showed interest in xenserver_guest_* Ansible modules either. My employer also ditched XenServer/XCP-ng in favor of VMware a few years back. Even with all the Broadcom/VMware situation, we got a super good deal with Broadcom because of our deployment size and commitment so we are sticking with VMWare.

All in all, if Ansible support for XenServer/XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra on par with VMware support is ever to see the light of day, these prerequisites are required:

Publicly available XenAPI simulator is a must
A working group of at least three people with knowledge in Python, Ansible and XenAPI committed to the cause
Possibly corporate and financial backing by Citrix, Vates? or some other third party

Having any official Ansible support for XenServer/XCP-ng was (and is) a miracle to this day. A miracle I was blessed with and a huge learning experience for me.

Sorry for the long post. It is not my intention to discourage people but I think everyone should understand why XenServer/XCP-ng does not enjoy better Ansible support. There is much much more to it than just having a willingness to do anything.

gskger

@bvitnik Thanks for this good insight and writeup on Ansible for XCP-ng. Resources and traction are important for the growth of an ecosystem, and commitment to this topics requires clear (paying) customer demand. Again thanks for sharing.

olivierlambert

We have more dedicated people coming to work on Ansible, Terraform and Packer tooling around XO API. I'm not that pessimistic than @bvitnik , otherwise we would have never create XO then XCP-ng in the first place

bvitnik

@olivierlambert I would have never guessed that I sound so pessimistic ... I just wrote my experience... reality is sometimes harsh.

Glad to hear you are investing in dedicated people. With more people, a good team and being a company, you certainly have more leverage than independent volunteers like myself. Any road map you can share publicly?

olivierlambert

No specific roadmap, mostly more dedicated people and fixing things as they come

hcoles

@olivierlambert Have there been any updates along these lines?

olivierlambert

Yes, we created the DevOps team so we'll have more bandwidth coming with it.