Automating Lunavi Cloud with Ansible

I’ve put together a basic ansible play that will create a user in the Lunavi vCloud geo us-mid-01. This post covers the basics of installing and authenticating to the API. It will create an idempotent user name ‘test’ with ‘Organizational Administrator’ privileges.

This just covers the basics. I would highly recommend encrypting the passwords via the ansible-vault command.

Assumptions

Item	Value	Notes
OS	Ubuntu 20.04	Any install of Ubuntu 20.04 (or any modern linux should suffice)
Python	Python 3.8	Python 3.6 is the minimum version needed to run pyvcloud
Lunavi Geo	us-mid-01	This was tested on us-mid-01. Others should work just as well. You will need to change the URL though.
Ansible	2.10.6	Anything >= 2.9 should work just fine
pyvcloud	current	pip3 install –user pyvcloud
ansible module vcloud director	current	git clone https://github.com/vmware/ansible-module-vcloud-director
Ansible Skeleton	Any	see below

Preparation

Install python >= 3.6

$ sudo apt-get install python3.8-dev python3.8

Install Ansible

$ pip3 install ansible ansible-base

Install vcloud ansible modules

$ git clone https://github.com/vmware/ansible-module-vcloud-director

Setup the ansible skeleton

$ mkdir ansible
$ cp -R ansible-module-vcloud-director/{modules|module_utils} ansible
$ cat << EOF
[defaults]
library = modules
module_utils = module_utils
EOF > ansible/ansible.cfg

Create a test play.

We are telling ansible to use the localhost, with a local connection, and set the shell environment variables below. Then we execute the ansible module vcd_user with the parameters necessary to create the idempotent user ‘testuser’.

$ vi vcloud.yml
Insert the following
---
- hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  vars:
  environment:
    env_user: "my_vcloud_username"
    env_password: "my_vcloud_password"  # you probably should put this in the vault
    env_host: https://mycloud.us-mid-01.lunavi.com/ 
    env_org: my_tenant_org
    env_api_version: "32.0"
    env_verify_ssl_certs: true

  tasks:
    - name: Create VcD user
      vcd_user:
        username: testuser
        userpassword: "super-secret"
        role_name: "Organization Administrator"
        org_name: my_tenant_org
        state: present
      register: vcd_user

    - name: print out vcd_user
      debug: var=vcd_user

Execute the play

$ ansible-playbook vcloud.yml
PLAY [localhost] **********************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Create VcD user] ****************************************************************************************************************************
[WARNING]: The value "0" (type int) was converted to "'0'" (type string). If this does not look like what you expect, quote the entire value to
ensure it does not change.
changed: [localhost]

TASK [print out vcd_user] *************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "vcd_user": {
        "changed": true,
        "failed": false,
        "msg": "User testuser has been created"
    }
}

PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=3    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0   

You can read more about the module documentation here: https://github.com/vmware/ansible-module-vcloud-director/blob/master/docs/index.md

Up next, I’m going to attempt to move all of my NAT and Firewall rules into ansible for easy management.

Hope this helps my fellow devops engineers out there!