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community.vmware 6.3.0 Released - Whats New and How to Test

Beginner
2024-01-012By Luca Berton

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community.vmware 6.3.0 Released - Whats New and How to Test

Introduction

community.vmware is the Ansible collection that provides modules and plugins for automating VMware vSphere infrastructure, covering vCenter, ESXi hosts, virtual machines, datastores, networking, tags, and more. Version 6.3.0 has been published to Ansible Galaxy. This article covers what changed in this release and how to install and verify it.

Whats New

The headline change in 6.3.0 is a version bump of the required vmware.vmware collection dependency to 2.10.0 (PR #2568). Alongside that bump, several modules have been marked as deprecated ahead of removal in community.vmware 8.0.0, and one bugfix has landed for network trunking.

Major Changes

  • Required vmware.vmware collection version bumped to 2.10.0 (#2568).

Deprecated Features

The following modules are deprecated in 6.3.0 and will be removed in community.vmware 8.0.0:

  • vcenter_standard_key_provider
  • vmware_guest_snapshot_info
  • vmware_host_facts
  • vmware_host_powerstate
  • vmware_host_service_info
  • vmware_host_service_manager
  • vmware_tag
  • vmware_tag_manager

In addition, the default values used by vmware_vcenter_settings are deprecated and will be removed where possible in 8.0.0 (issue #2559).

All of the above are tracked under PR #2568. Users relying on these modules should start planning migration to their replacements before the 8.0.0 release.

Bugfixes

  • vmware_guest_network - fixed an issue affecting trunked / PVLAN portgroups (issue #2567).

How to Install and Test

# Install or upgrade community.vmware to the latest version
ansible-galaxy collection install community.vmware --upgrade

# Install the exact version 6.3.0
ansible-galaxy collection install community.vmware:==6.3.0

# Verify the installed version
ansible-galaxy collection list community.vmware

# Confirm the required vmware.vmware dependency is satisfied
ansible-galaxy collection list vmware.vmware

# Check documentation for a deprecated module (e.g. vmware_tag)
ansible-doc community.vmware.vmware_tag

Conclusion

community.vmware 6.3.0 is a maintenance-focused release: it raises the minimum required vmware.vmware dependency to 2.10.0, deprecates eight modules and one set of defaults ahead of the 8.0.0 major release, and fixes a portgroup trunking bug in vmware_guest_network. Teams still using vmware_tag, vmware_tag_manager, vmware_host_facts, vmware_host_powerstate, vmware_host_service_info, vmware_host_service_manager, vmware_guest_snapshot_info, or vcenter_standard_key_provider should review the deprecation notices and start planning their migration path.

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