Before we complete this chapter, I am going to share an example playbook I wrote for deploying a small number of virtual machines in a VMware cluster. The idea with the project was to launch seven virtual machines into a customer's network which are as follows:
- One Linux jump host
- One NTP server
- One load balancer
- Two web servers
- Two database servers
The VMs all had to be built from an existing template; unfortunately, this template was built with a hardcoded gateway IP address of 192.168.1.254 in the /etc/sysconfig/network file. This meant that for these machines to correctly appear on the network, I had to make changes to each of the virtual machines once they had been launched.
I started off by setting up a file called vmware.yml in my group_vars folder; this contained the information needed to connect to my VMware installation and also the default...