Ansible - vmware: how to find a guest on a multiple hosts vcenter?

Question

One of the many Ansible Community.VMWare modules parameters is 'hostname', which is the name of the ESXi server.

In my case, a guest could be in one of multiple ESXi servers (8, for now), and also a new server could be added by the support team at any time.

Is there a way to find on which ESXi server a guest is? Or is it mandatory that I know this at start?

I could have a list of the ESXi servers, keep updating it on demand, and loop over this list using module 'community.vmware.vmware_guest_find' and "with_items", but actually, I don't know how would I do this (iterate over the servers, changing the 'hostname', and stopping when I finally find the guest).

Any help?

Answer 1

I came up with this solution below. It's necessary to have previously the list of ESXi hosts.

[...]
vars:
  vcenters_hostname:
    - vcenter01
    - vcenter02
    - ...
[...]
- block:
    - name: Navigate throughout all vcenters looking for the guest
      community.vmware.vmware_guest_find:
        hostname: "{{ item }}"
        username: "{{ vcenter_username }}"
        password: "{{ vcenter_password }}"
        name: "{{ guest_name }}"
        validate_certs: no
      delegate_to: localhost
      register: guest_find_result
      with_items: "{{ vcenter_hostnames }}"
  rescue:
    - name: Doing nothing only to don't raise a fail message
      meta: noop
  always:
    - name: Record which vcenter and folder is the guest
      ansible.builtin.set_fact:
        guest_folder: "{{ item['folders'][0] }}"
        vcenter_hostname: "{{ item['item'] }}"
      with_items: "{{ guest_find_result['results'] }}"
      when: item['failed'] == false