{"id":4257,"date":"2025-09-17T12:38:31","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T12:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.it-react.com\/?p=4257"},"modified":"2025-09-29T22:45:39","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T22:45:39","slug":"vmware-vsphere-automating-vm-deployment-with-ansible-and-gitlab-ci-cd-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.it-react.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/17\/vmware-vsphere-automating-vm-deployment-with-ansible-and-gitlab-ci-cd-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"VMware vSphere – Automating VM Deployment with Ansible and GitLab CI\/CD – Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019t directly responsible for writing the playbooks. My role was more on the VMware side \u2014 managing vCenter, handling ESXi administration, and preparing the YAML host files that Ansible would use. At the same time, I was also learning how to work with Git, since those YAML files needed to be versioned and pushed into the repository.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though I wasn\u2019t the one building the automation logic, I found the whole process fascinating. Watching how a pipeline could trigger Ansible and, based on predefined variables, automatically provision a VM in a consistent way really caught my attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, I\u2019ve kept thinking how powerful this approach was and how much time it could save compared to manual deployment in the vSphere client. Ever since, I\u2019ve wanted to try implementing a similar setup in my own lab environment \u2014 of course on a smaller scale, but mainly to understand the workflow and the tools involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post is about revisiting that idea and experimenting with Ansible and GitLab CI\/CD for VM automation in a homelab setting. My goal is not only to reproduce what I saw back then, but also to really understand how it all fits together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About Ansible and GitLab CI\/CD<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ansible<\/strong> is an open-source automation tool widely used for provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. It works with a simple, human-readable syntax (YAML playbooks) and does not require agents on managed systems, making it easy to adopt and integrate into existing environments. In the case of VMware, Ansible provides dedicated modules and collections (such as community.vmware<\/em>) that allow direct interaction with vCenter to create, modify, or remove virtual machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GitLab CI\/CD<\/strong> is a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform integrated into GitLab. It allows us to define automated pipelines that run whenever changes are pushed to a repository. By combining GitLab CI\/CD with Ansible, infrastructure tasks like deploying new VMs can be triggered directly from version-controlled code, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and traceability of every change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prerequisites<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To build this lab, we will need the following main components:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. vSphere Environment<\/h3>\n\n\n\n