oVirt Blog — oVirt

The recent post, An Introduction to Ansible Roles, discussed the new roles that were introduced in the oVirt 4.1.6 release. This follow-up post will explain how to set up and use Ansible roles, using either Ansible Galaxy or oVirt Ansible Roles RPM.

Ansible Galaxy

To make life easier, Ansible Galaxy stores multiple Ansible roles, including oVirt Ansible roles. To install the roles, perform the next steps:

To install roles on your local machine, run the following command:

$ ansible-galaxy install ovirt.ovirt-ansible-roles

This will install your roles into directory /etc/ansible/roles/ovirt.ovirt-ansible-roles/.

By default, Ansible only searches for roles in /etc/ansible/roles/ directory and your current working directory.

To change the directories where Ansible looks for roles, modify the roles_path option of [defaults] section in ansible.cfg configuration file.

The default location of this file is in /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg.

$ sed -i 's|#roles_path    = /etc/ansible/roles|roles_path = /etc/ansible/roles:/etc/ansible/roles/ovirt.ovirt-ansible-roles/roles|'  /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

For more information on changing the directories where Ansible searches for roles, see the Ansible documentation pages.

Copy one of the examples from the directory /etc/ansible/roles/ovirt.ovirt-ansible-roles/examples/ into your working directory, then modify the needed variables and run the playbook.

oVirt Ansible Roles RPM

In the latest oVirt repositories you can find the ovirt-ansible-roles package. To make the oVirt repositories available, install ovirt-release RPM:

$ yum install -y http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/yum-repo/ovirt-release41.rpm

oVirt release repository now provides ovirt-ansible-roles package:

$ yum install -y ovirt-ansible-roles

The structure of the ovirt-ansible-roles package is as follows:

/usr/share/ansible/roles – stores the roles
/usr/share/doc/ovirt-ansible-roles/ – stores the examples, a basic overview and the licence
/usr/share/doc/ansible/roles/{role_name} – stores the documentation specific to the role

Copy one of the examples from the directory /usr/share/doc/ovirt-ansible-roles/examples into your working directory, then modify the needed variables and run the playbook.

An Example of Tweaking and Running the Playbook

Create Example Playbook

Running the example from Galaxy or RPM is bit different. Therefore, please follow the relevant instructions.

Ansible Galaxy

The following steps assume that: you followed the steps on how to install the roles from Galaxy, your roles are installed in /etc/ansible/roles/ovirt.ovirt-ansible-roles/roles/, and you have tweaked ansible.cfg to look for those roles.

Run a role called ovirt-image-template to download the qcow2 image and create a template from it.

Copy the ovirt-image-template role example. In this example we will use /tmp as the working directory:

$ cd /tmp
$ cp /etc/ansible/roles/ovirt.ovirt-ansible-roles/examples/ovirt_image_template.yml .

oVirt Ansible Roles RPM

The following steps assume that: you followed the instructions on how to install the roles from RPM, and your roles are already installed in /usr/share/ansible/roles.

Run a role called ovirt-image-template to download the qcow2 image and create a template from it.

Copy the ovirt-image-template role example. In this example I will use /tmp as the working directory:

$ cd /tmp
$ cp /usr/share/doc/ovirt-ansible-roles/examples/ovirt_image_template.yml .

Tweaking and Running the Playbook

Modify the variables to reflect your needs:

---
- name: oVirt image template
  hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  gather_facts: false

  vars_files:
    # Contains encrypted `engine_password` varibale using ansible-vault
    - passwords.yml

  vars:
    engine_url: https://ovirt-engine.example.com/ovirt-engine/api
    engine_user: admin@internal
    engine_cafile: /etc/pki/ovirt-engine/ca.pem

    qcow_url: https://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-GenericCloud.qcow2
    template_cluster: testcluster
    template_name: centos7_template
    template_memory: 2GiB
    template_cpu: 2
    template_disk_size: 10GiB
    template_disk_storage: nfs

  roles:
    - ovirt-image-template

Create a file with an oVirt engine user password:

$ cat passwords.yml
engine_password: youruserpassword

Encrypt the file with an oVirt user password. You will be asked for a vault password:

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

Encryption successful will confirm that you have encrypted the file.

Ensure you have installed Python SDK on your machine because you will run your playbook on localhost:

$ yum install -y python-ovirt-engine-sdk4

If you use Galaxy and don’t have oVirt repositories you can install Python SDK from pip:

$ pip install ovirt-engine-sdk-python

Run the playbook:

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

That’s it. After the ansible-playbook command completes successfully, you will have deployed a template using the qcow2 image.”