Dynamic inventory scripts for ansible and vcenter. This script provides example how to use pyvmomi api. Nowadays Ansible provides production-ready inventory plugin vmware_inventory.py

Based on:

• vmware/pyvmomi-community-samples
• vmware/pyvmomi api documentation
• ansible-vmware inventory script based on old pyshphere package

sudo dnf install python-pyvmomi PyYAML

• Copy vcenter_inv.yml.dist to vcenter_inv.yml and edit hostname, user, password. Or you can use one yaml config file with variables for ansible vsphere_guest module and vcenter_inv.py (just create symlink to group_vars/all, for example). Also, you can put configuration file to any place and set VCENTER_INV_CFG environment variable to it.
• Run ./vcenter_inv.py --list:

Example output:

{
    "vcenter": {
        "children": [
            "centos64Guest",
            "sles11_64Guest"
        ]
    },
    "sles11_64Guest": {
        "hosts": [
            "192.168.1.13",
        ]
    },
    "centos64Guest": {
        "hosts": [
            "192.168.1.14",
            "192.168.1.15"
        ]
    }
}

• Run ansible ping with '-i' options:

# export VCENTER_INV_CFG=~/.ansible/vcenter_inv.py
ansible -i path/to/vcenter_inv.py -m ping

or add to ansible.cfg:

[defaults]
inventory = path/to/inventory/vcenter_inv.py