Using Ansible to define and manage KVM guests and networks with YAML inventories

I wanted a way to quickly spin different VMs up and down on my KVM dev box, to help with testing things like OpenStack, Swift, Ceph and Kubernetes. Some of my requirements were as follows:

• Define everything in a markup language, like YAML
• Manage VMs (define, stop, start, destroy and undefine) and apply settings as a group or individually
• Support different settings for each VMs, like disks, memory, CPU, etc
• Support multiple drives and types, including Virtio, SCSI, SATA and NVMe
• Create users and set root passwords
• Manage networks (create, delete) and which VMs go on them
• Mix and match Linux distros and releases
• Use existing cloud images from distros
• Manage access to the VMs including DNS/hosts resolution and SSH keys
• Have a good set of defaults so it would work out of the box
• Potentially support other architectures (like ppc64le or arm)

So I hacked together an Ansible role and example playbook. Setting guest states to running, shutdown, destroyed or undefined (to delete and clean up) are supported. It will also manage multiple libvirt networks and guests can have different specs as well as multiple disks of different types (SCSI, SATA, Virtio, NVMe). With Ansible’s –limit option, any individual guest, a hostgroup of guests, or even a mix can be managed.

Although Terraform with libvirt support is potentially a good solution, by using Ansible I can use that same inventory to further manage the guests and I’ve also been able to configure the KVM host itself. All that’s really needed is a Linux host capable of running KVM, some guest images and a basic inventory. The Ansible will do the rest (on supported distros).

The README is quite detailed, so I won’t repeat all of that here. The sample playbook comes with some example inventories, such as this simple one for spinning up three CentOS hosts (and using defaults).

simple:
  hosts:
    centos-simple-[0:2]:
      ansible_python_interpreter: /usr/bin/python

This can be executed like so.

curl -O https://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-GenericCloud.qcow2
sudo mv -iv CentOS-7-x86_64-GenericCloud.qcow2 /var/lib/libvirt/images/

git clone --recursive https://github.com/csmart/virt-infra-ansible.git
cd virt-infra-ansible

ansible-playbook --limit kvmhost,simple ./virt-infra.yml

There is also a more detailed example inventory that uses multiple distros and custom settings for the guests.

So far this has been very handy!