VMware: community plan - ansible/community GitHub Wiki

VMware community ideas, concerns, solutions

This document lists various items discussed for future development

Feel free to add your ideas, concerns, solutions to this list.

Major problems

  • We lack experienced VMware people with a deep understanding of VMware internals
    • Although we seem to have a very large/interested community, only 3 people are active
    • We need help in reviewing code and help with design decisions and implementation
    • As a result the breaking folder-changes may not actually the best way forward, but it will ship in v2.4...
  • Quality of VMware modules is lacking
    • We have no real infrastructure for testing (no ESXi, no vCenter...)
      • vcsim has a lot of limitations -- details
    • A lot of VMware modules are not idempotent or do not support check-mode -- details
    • Most VMware modules lack integration tests -- details
  • There is no holistic view to VMware support
    • How do we expect users to manage their VMware and vCenter infrastructure (What are we working towards ?)
    • What modules do we lack to cover this ?
    • How are modules supposed to work together (common functionality, standard interfaces, parameters, result values)

Other problems and limitations

  • There is no module to generate content of a virtual floppy or virtual cd image, to provide files to the guest in a very early state (e. g. VMXNet3 or the Para virtual driver while bein in the os setup screen)

Ansible v2.4 freeze - Done

  • Adding support for configuring a CD-rom iso image #28155
  • Added folder and datacenter to the examples #25221

Module development

  • We are making changes between versions which break backward compatibility, as a result playbooks will only work for a single Ansible release, and porting them can be a huge task. -- example
  • What to do with the Chaperone Ansible modules from VMware at https://github.com/vmware/ansible-modules-extras-gpl3 (dagwieers)

Documentation

  • A separate VMware related section for users, and one for developers would be useful.

Clean up actions

  • Start tracking which modules do no have integration tests yet - Tracker
  • Start tracking which modules should be adapted to latest capabilities of module_utils/vmware.py