Have you ever think how to automate your everyday tasks on your RHV/oVirt infrastructure? In this post we will guide you how to start your RHV/oVirt automation in just 15 min!

Let’s get started!

Red Hat Virtualization/oVirt includes support for the Ansible automation tool. Ansible can be used to configure systems, deploy software, and perform rolling updates. Ansible provides modules that allow you to automate RHV post-installation tasks such as data center setup and configuration, managing users, virtual machine operations and many more.

There are multiple reasons to choose Ansible if you need an automation tool for RHV/oVirt:

It’s easier to learn than existing SDKs or Rest APIs
Even with limited programming knowledge, you will find Ansible easier to use and get started than existing tools.

Lightweight and scalable
Ansible is agentless and simply requires an SSH connection with the target systems. Ansible requires Python which is widely used in Linux distros.

Automatically installed with RHV/oVirt 4.1 and later
Ansible is automatically installed with Red Hat Virtualization Manager 4.1+ and oVirt Manager 4.1+, but it can also be installed on a separate machine using the RHV/oVirt repositories.

Ansible Roles are available to help configure and manage various parts of the RHV infrastructure
Red Hat provides multiple roles in the ovirt-ansible-roles package that can be used to manage various parts of the RHV infrastructure, which makes using Ansible even easier.

What you need to start

To start you RHV/oVirt infrastructure automation you need to make sure your Ansible host is equipped with a few things:

– Ansible Engine version >= 2.2
– python >= 2.7
– ovirt-engine-sdk-python >= 4.2.4

Most oVirt Ansible modules were introduced in Ansible Engine started from the version 2.2. Having that in mind it is critical to start with proper Ansible Engine version as most of the modules we will ever use are shipped with Engine itself.

Python version is just a pure Ansible prerequisite. For most of usecases and modules python 2.7 is the minimum required to have on Ansible host.

The last but not least is ovirt-engine-sdk-python package which needs to be installed on Ansible host.

The software development kit is an interface for the Red Hat Virtualization/oVirt REST API. As such, you must use the version of the software development kit that corresponds to the version of your Red Hat Virtualization/oVirt environment. For example, if you are using Red Hat Virtualization 4.2, you must use the version of the software development kit designed for 4.2. Having mention that, it is a good opportunity to stop for a while and explain how exactly Ansible works with platforms such as RHV/oVirt.

Lets take a look at the picture below:

As you can see there is a significant difference when it comes to playbook execution between “standard” OS based approach and platform such as Red Hat Virtualization / oVirt.

In short words our YAML code (playbook) is translated into a python code and then python is translated into API calls to the platform, RHV/oVirt in this case. Thanks to that the only prerequisites we need to take care of are placed on Ansible host. We do not need to change anything on RHV side to make it work!

How to install ovirt-engine-sdk-python

Keep in mind this needs to be done on Ansible host.

On Fedora >= 24 and CentOS 7

The SDK can be installed using the RPM packages provided by the oVirt project. To do so install the oVirt release package:
dnf install http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/yum-repo/ovirt-release42.rpm

Then install the SDK packages
dnf install python-ovirt-engine-sdk4

For other operating systems (and also for Fedora and CentOS) you can install the SDK using the `pip` command, which will download the source from i [PyPI], build and install it.

On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

The SDK can be installed using the RPM packages provided by the RHV repos.

Enable the required channels

subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-rpms
subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-rhv-4.2-rpms

Install the required packages
yum install python-ovirt-engine-sdk4

Let’s Test It

Now when we have everything installed and properly set up there is a time to test and see if our Ansible host is able to communicate with RHV/oVirt environment and finally do some automation tasks.

Before we finally start our first Ansible playbook against RHV you need to know how to authenticate to your RHV/oVirt platform using Ansible.

To make it work we use ovirt_auth module. This module authenticates to oVirt/RHV engine and creates SSO token, which should be later used in all other oVirt/RHV modules, so all modules don’t need to perform login and logout. This module returns an Ansible fact called ovirt_auth. Every module can use this fact as auth parameter, to perform authentication.

Knowing that now we can create two files containing necessary variables. First one will be rhv_vars.yml which Contains variables needed to connect to the RHV Manager.

$ cat rhvm_vars.yml
---
engine_fqdn: rhvm.example.com
engine_user: admin@internal
engine_cafile: /etc/pki/ovirt-engine/ca.pem

Second one will be vault encrypted file with Red Hat Virtualization Manager password (rhvm_password).

$ cat password.yml
---
rhvm_password: myrhvmpassword

As it is not a good idea to store passwords in plain text variable file that is why we will encrypt it using Ansible provided vault mechanism.

$ ansible-vault encrypt password.yml
New Vault password:
Confirm New Vault password:

Now it is the time to put everything together and compose our final playbook. This playbook will create VM from a template previously prepared and available on out test environment.

$ cat rhv_vm_create.yml
---
- name: Create VM on RHV
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  gather_facts: false

  vars_files:
    - rhv_vars.yml
    - password.yml

  pre_tasks:
    - name: Login to oVirt
      ovirt_auth:
        hostname: "{{ rhvm_fqdn }}"
        username: "{{ rhvm_user }}"
        password: "{{ rhvm_password }}"
        ca_file: "{{ rhvm_cafile | default(omit) }}"
        insecure: "{{ rhvm_insecure | default(true) }}"
      tags:
        - always

  vars:
    datacenter: MyRHV
    cluster: MyRHVCluster
    template: rhel7-template
    vm_memory: 1GiB
    vm_name: test-vm01


  tasks:
  - name: Create and run VM from template
    ovirt_vms:
     auth: "{{ ovirt_auth }}"
      name: "{{ vm_name }}"
      template: "{{ template }}"
      cluster: "{{ cluster }}"
      memory: "{{vm_memory}}"
      high_availability: true
      state: present
      wait: yes

  post_tasks:
    - name: Logout from oVirt
      ovirt_auth:
        state: absent
        ovirt_auth: "{{ ovirt_auth }}"
     tags:
       - always

Now let’s take a closer look at some specific parameters we put in our playbook.

Inventory and connection method
As we described previously how Ansible works with RHV/oVirt we do not need to worry about inventory file here. This is because our playbook will be executed on Ansible host.

$ cat rhv_vm_create.yml
---
- name: Create VM on RHV
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  gather_facts: false

Variables
In our playbook you can find variables loaded from two files rhv_vars.yml and passwod.yml we prepared previously to fulfill ovirt_auth module needs. The second set of variables were put in playbook itself to deliver all needed values for ovirt_vm module we use to manage VMs (create, delete, stop, start, etc.) on RHV/oVirt platform.

$ cat rhv_vm_create.yml
---
- name: Create VM on RHV
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  gather_facts: false

  vars_files:
    - rhv_vars.yml
    - password.yml


...


   vars:
    datacenter: MyRHV
    cluster: MyRHVCluster
    template: rhel7-template
    vm_memory: 1GiB
    vm_name: test-vm01

...

Pre and Post Tasks
As you can see also we have sections with pre and post tasks in our playbook. They are responsible for generating SSO token using ovirt_auth module (pre_tasks section) and at the end revoke token when all needed tasks were completed (post_tasks section).

Please pay attention we also introduced tags: always to make sure these tasks will always be run.

$ cat rhv_vm_create.yml
---
- name: Create VM on RHV
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  gather_facts: false

...

  pre_tasks:
    - name: Login to oVirt
      ovirt_auth:
        hostname: "{{ rhvm_fqdn }}"
        username: "{{ rhvm_user }}"
        password: "{{ rhvm_password }}"
        ca_file: "{{ rhvm_cafile | default(omit) }}"
        insecure: "{{ rhvm_insecure | default(true) }}"
      tags:
        - always

...


  post_tasks:
    - name: Logout from oVirt
      ovirt_auth:
        state: absent
        ovirt_auth: "{{ ovirt_auth }}"
      tags:
        - always

Now let’s start our playbook

$ ansible-playbook --ask-vault-pass rhv_vm_create.yml

Useful links

ovirt_vm – Module to manage Virtual Machines in oVirt/RHV
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/ovirt_vm_module.html#ovirt-vm-module

ovirt_auth – Module to manage authentication to oVirt/RHV
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/ovirt_auth_module.html

All RHV/oVirt Ansible modules
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/list_of_cloud_modules.html#ovirt

RHV Python SDK Guide
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_virtualization/4.2/html/python_sdk_guide/index