How to Get VMware vSphere Virtual Machine UUID with Ansible?

I’m going to show you a live Playbook and some simple Ansible code. I’m Luca Berton and welcome to today’s episode of Ansible Pilot.

Ansible Get VMware vSphere Virtual Machine UUID

  • community.vmware.vmware_guest_info
  • Gather info about a single VM

Let’s talk about the Ansible module vmware_guest_info. The full name is community.vmware.vmware_guest_info, which means that is part of the collection of modules to interact with VMware, community-supported. The module’s purpose is to gather info about a single VM.

Parameters

  • hostname string / port integer / username string / password string / datacenter string / validate_certs boolean - connection details
  • name string - Virtual machine name

The following parameters are useful in order to Get VMware vSphere Virtual Machine UUID using the module vmware_guest_info. First of all, we need to establish the connection with VMware vSphere or VMware vCenter using a plethora of self-explicative parameters: hostname, port, username, password, datacenter, and validate_certs. Once the connection is successfully established you could specify the virtual machine name to obtain all information about it.

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Playbook

How to Get VMware vSphere Virtual Machine UUID with Ansible. I’m going to show you how to Gather Information about a specific “myvm” VMware Virtual Machine and select the UUID using Ansible Playbook.

code

  • vm_uuid.yml
---
- name: vm UUID Playbook
  hosts: localhost
  become: false
  gather_facts: false
  collections:
    - community.vmware
  pre_tasks:
    - include_vars: vars.yml
  tasks:
    - name: Get VM UUID
      vmware_guest_info:
        hostname: "{{ vcenter_hostname }}"
        username: "{{ vcenter_username }}"
        password: "{{ vcenter_password }}"
        datacenter: "{{ vcenter_datacenter }}"
        validate_certs: "{{ vcenter_validate_certs }}"
        name: "{{ vm_name }}"
      register: detailed_vm_info
    - name: print VM UUID
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        var: detailed_vm_info.instance.hw_product_uuid
  • vars.yml
---
vcenter_hostname: "vmware.example.com"
vcenter_datacenter: "vmwaredatacenter"
vcenter_validate_certs: false
vcenter_username: "[email protected]"
vcenter_password: "MySecretPassword123"
vm_name: "myvm"

execution

$ ansible-playbook vm_uuid.yml 
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost
does not match 'all'
PLAY [vm UUID Playbook] ***************************************************************************************
TASK [include_vars] ***************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [Get VM UUID] ****************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [print VM UUID] **************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "detailed_vm_info.instance.hw_product_uuid": "4225a846-b176-892d-0e27-10a4106269a0"
}
PLAY RECAP ************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=3    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

idempotency

$ ansible-playbook vm_uuid.yml 
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost
does not match 'all'
PLAY [vm UUID Playbook] ***************************************************************************************
TASK [include_vars] ***************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [Get VM UUID] ****************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [print VM UUID] **************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "detailed_vm_info.instance.hw_product_uuid": "4225a846-b176-892d-0e27-10a4106269a0"
}
PLAY RECAP ************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=3    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0
vSphere

after execution

vmware_guest_info after execution

code with ❤️ in GitHub

Conclusion

Now you know how to Get VMware vSphere Virtual Machine UUID with Ansible. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, Medium, and Website, X (formerly Twitter) to not miss the next episode of the Ansible Pilot.

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