Deploying a KVM/Libvirt VM through Ansible

For this article I already have a fedora based server running which I want to deploy a pre-packaged Virtual Machine through Ansible.

First, we’ll look at the task YAML file which will let us deploy the Virtual Machine (roles/vm/tasks/main.yml):

---
  - name: Create a directory if it does not exist
    file:
      path: /opt/vms
      state: directory
      mode: '0755'
  
  - name: Upload VM Image
    unarchive:
      src: your-vm-name.zip
      dest: /opt/vms
- name: Install Cockpit
    yum: name=cockpit state=present
- name: Install Libvirt
    yum: name=libvirt state=present
- name: Install KVM
    yum: name=qemu-kvm state=present
- name: Install QEMU
    yum: name=qemu state=present
- name: Start service libvirt
    service:
      name: libvirtd
      state: started
- name: Install Cockpit Machines Extension
    yum: name=cockpit-machines state=present
- name: Define VM
    community.libvirt.virt:
      command: define
      xml: "{{ lookup('file', 'your-vm.xml') }}"
- name: Start VM
    community.libvirt.virt:
      name: your-vm
      state: running
- name: set autostart for a VM
    community.libvirt.virt:
      name: your-vm
      autostart: yes

This task will execute the following steps for us:

• First, it will create a folder (if it does not exist) at /opt/vms. This is the location I typically have my Virtual Machine stored.
• Then it will upload the zip file containing the qcow2 file. This zip file is located in roles/vm/files/ directory.
• Next ansible will make sure that all dependencies required to run the virtual machine are present. I like to use Cockpit to manage my VMs, therefore I also install
• As a next step, a previously created XML, describing the Virtual Machine, is imported. You can create this file yourself through virt-manager locally, then executing virsh dumpxml to retrieve the XML.
• As a final step, we configure this VM to be automatically started upon system startup.

In your site.yml you’ll typically need to ensure that “become: yes” is set on the vm role.

---
- hosts: vm
  remote_user: <your-user>
  become: yes
  roles:
  - vm

Next, you can assign this role to a host through an inventory file:

[vm]
<ip-or-hostname>