DevOps Articles

Using VMware vCenter Tags in a Red Hat Ansible Tower Dynamic Inventory

Ansible delivers simple IT automation that ends repetitive tasks and frees up DevOps teams for more strategic work. Ansible is powerful IT automation that you can learn quickly.

For example: cloud region and a specific subset of variables you could pass to those inventory scripts surfaced as variables you could pass to the inventory source, which means that new configuration parameters that come with Ansible inventory plugins are not supported in order to maintain compatibility with the old inventory scripts.

This specific example is for an Amazon EC2 source in Ansible Tower 3.8: As you can see, the “Instance Filters” and “Regions” configuration options are no longer a part of the user interface in Ansible Tower 3.8, but the configuration can now be done in the “Source Variables” section of the inventory source definition.

As we can use an inventory source with a custom python virtual environment, we will create a new python virtual environment under /opt/towervenvs called vmware-venv, and will be installing the required libraries in that environment (you can read more about Ansible Tower’s virtual environments and how to use them in the documentation).