For a long long time, virtualization has been an important technology in the IT industry as it provides an efficient way for hardware resources and allows us to easily manage application life cycle inside the Virtual Machine (VM). In 2001, VMware released the first version of the ESXi that could run directly over the commodity off the shelf (COTS) server while converting it to a resource that could be consumed by multiple separate virtual machines. In this chapter, we will explore many options available to automate the building of virtual machine thanks to Python and Ansible.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Setting up the lab environment
- Generating a VMX file using Jinja2
- VMware Python clients
- Using Ansible playbooks to manage instances
