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In the first part of this series, we built the foundation of our automation framework: a clean directory structure, proper inventories, OS-specific variable separation, secure Vault usage, and the vCenter settings that glue everything together. Think of it as laying out all tools on the workbench before touching the actual machine. Now comes the fun […]

At our holiday home — a quiet place we visit just once or twice a year — I wanted to know exactly what’s happening there, even when we’re not around. Call it freak-control if you will, but when you have a heating system running through the winter and the power tends to drop every now

In the last post I proved the flow locally: Ansible talks to vCenter, clones from a template, and the VM comes up with our settings. That was the “manual gear.” Now I want the “automatic gear”—a GitLab pipeline that runs the same steps for me, consistently, from any commit. My goals are simple: keep secrets

In this post we move from lab setup to hands-on automation. The goal is to provision virtual machines on vSphere automatically by combining Ansible playbooks with a GitLab CI/CD pipeline. Everything lives as code in a Git repository: VM definitions, playbooks, and the pipeline that runs them. With a single commit, GitLab triggers Ansible, which

A few months ago, when I first came across a project where Ansible and GitLab CI/CD were used to automate VM deployments in VMware vCenter, I wasn’t directly responsible for writing the playbooks. My role was more on the VMware side — managing vCenter, handling ESXi administration, and preparing the YAML host files that Ansible