ephracis / community.vmware

Ansible Collection for VMware

Ansible Collection: community.vmware

This repo hosts the community.vmware Ansible Collection.

The collection includes the VMware modules and plugins supported by Ansible VMware community to help the management of VMware infrastructure.

Releases and maintenance

Release	Status	End of life
4	Maintained	Nov 2025
3	Maintained (bug fixes only)	Nov 2024
2	Unmaintained	Nov 2023

Ansible version compatibility

This collection has been tested against following Ansible versions: >=2.15.0.

Plugins and modules within a collection may be tested with only specific Ansible versions. A collection may contain metadata that identifies these versions. PEP440 is the schema used to describe the versions of Ansible.

Installation and Usage

Installing the Collection from Ansible Galaxy

Before using the VMware community collection, you need to install the collection with the ansible-galaxy CLI:

ansible-galaxy collection install community.vmware

You can also include it in a requirements.yml file and install it via ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml using the format:

collections:
- name: community.vmware

Required Python libraries

VMware community collection depends on Python 3.9+ and on following third party libraries:

• Pyvmomi
• vSphere Automation SDK for Python
• vSAN Management SDK for Python

Installing required libraries and SDK

Installing collection does not install any required third party Python libraries or SDKs. You need to install the required Python libraries using following command:

pip install -r ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/community/vmware/requirements.txt

If you are working on developing and/or testing VMware community collection, you may want to install additional requirements using following command:

pip install -r ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/community/vmware/test-requirements.txt

Testing and Development

If you want to develop new content for this collection or improve what is already here, the easiest way to work on the collection is to clone it into one of the configured COLLECTIONS_PATHS, and work on it there.

• Guidelines for VMware module development

Testing with ansible-test

Refer testing for more information.

Publishing New Version

Assuming your (local) repository has set origin to your GitHub fork and this repository is added as upstream:

Prepare the release:

• Make sure your fork is up to date: git checkout main && git pull && git fetch upstream && git merge upstream/main.
• Run ansible-playbook tools/prepare_release.yml. The playbook tries to generate the next minor release automatically, but you can also set the version explicitly with --extra-vars "version=$VERSION". You will have to set the version explicitly when publishing a new major release.
• Push the created release branch to your GitHub repo (git push --set-upstream origin prepare_$VERSION_release) and open a PR for review.

Push the release:

• After the PR has been merged, make sure your fork is up to date: git checkout main && git pull && git fetch upstream && git merge upstream/main.
• Tag the release: git tag -s $VERSION
• Push the tag: git push upstream $VERSION

Revert the version in galaxy.yml back to null:

• Make sure your fork is up to date: git checkout main && git pull && git fetch upstream && git merge upstream/main.
• Run ansible-playbook tools/unset_version.yml.
• Push the created branch to your GitHub repo (git push --set-upstream origin unset_version_$VERSION) and open a PR for review.

Communication

You can find other people interested in this in the Ansible VMware room on Matrix / in the #ansible-vmware channel on libera.chat IRC.

For general usage question, please also consider the Get Help category in the Ansible Community Forum and tag it with vmware.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 or later

See LICENSE to see the full text.