How to Expand a Virtual Disk in VMware vSphere Virtual Machine with Ansible?

I'm going to show you a live Playbook and some simple Ansible code.

I'm Luca Berton and welcome to today's episode of Ansible Pilot.

Ansible Expand a Virtual Disk in VMware vSphere Virtual Machine

  • community.vmware.vmware_guest_disk
  • Manage disks related to a virtual machine in a given vCenter infrastructure

Let's talk about the Ansible module vmware_guest_disk.

The full name is community.vmware.vmware_guest_disk, which means that is part of the collection of modules to interact with VMware, community-supported.

It manages disks related to a virtual machine in a given vCenter infrastructure.

Parameters

  • hostname string / username string / password string / datacenter string / validate_certs boolean - connection details
  • datacenter string - The datacenter name to which the virtual machine belongs to
  • scsi_controller / unit_number / scsi_type string - SCSI controller details
  • size / size_kb / size_mb / size_gb / size_tb string - Disk storage size
  • disk_mode string - persistent / independent_persistent / independent_nonpersistent

The following parameters are useful in order to Expand a Virtual Disk in VMware vSphere Virtual Machine using the module vmware_guest_disk.

First of all, we need to establish the connection with VMware vSphere or VMware vCenter using a plethora self-explicative parameters: hostname, username, password, datacenter, and validate_certs.

Once the connection is successfully established you could specify the desired disk configuration, in this expansion, a disk is connected to a virtual machine.

The mandatory parameters are only datacenter and unit_number.

The datacenter parameter specifies which datacenter name the virtual machine belongs to, for resources allocations.

The disk must be connected to a SCSI controller inside the virtual machine, so you should specify all the small details like scsi_controller, unit_number, and scsi_type.

You might be interested in deep-diving into some performance analysis to properly adjust these parameters.

You could specify the disk size via various parameters according to the needed size unit: kb, MB, GB, TB, etc.

One most important parameter is the disk_mode, default to persistent mode, other options are independent_persistent and independent_nonpersistent.

Links

  • [community.vmware.vmware_guest_disk](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/vmware/vmware_guest_disk_module.html)

## Playbook

How to Expand a Virtual Disk in VMware vSphere Virtual Machine with Ansible.

I'm going to show you how to expand the size of an additional disk connected to a Virtual Machine named "myvm" using Ansible Playbook. The disk is connected to a SCSI controller number 1 and has unit number 1. The beginning of the Playbook has a size of 1 GB and we would like to expand it to 2 GB.

code

  • vm_disk_expand.yml

```yaml

---

  • name: vm disk Playb