In today's short and sweet #100DaysToOffload (post 005!), I would like to show off an #ansible playbook for creating VMs in #proxmox.

I wrote this playbook several weeks ago when I was trying to stretch the limits of what I could do with Ansible. It would be much better to do this with #opentofu or #terraform but I thought this was a fun exercise.

A few ways I would improve this playbook:

• Add all the hard coded variables to a prompt, ENV vars, or maybe a vault
• Check to see if the vmid exists before attempting to build the machine
• Add more descriptive output when the play is done

In the future, I'd like to try to pull this off with #pulumi as well.

---
- name: Create Fedora Server VM with demo user
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: yes
  vars:
    proxmox_host: "IP OR HOSTNAME"

  vars_prompt:
    - name: proxmox_user
      prompt: "Proxmox username (e.g., root@pam)"
      private: no
    - name: proxmox_password
      prompt: "Proxmox password"
      private: yes

  tasks:
    - name: Read SSH public key
      slurp:
        src: "{{ ansible_env.HOME }}/.ssh/id_rsa.pub"
      register: ssh_key

    - name: Create Fedora VM
      community.general.proxmox_kvm:
        api_host: "{{ proxmox_host }}"
        api_user: "{{ proxmox_user }}"
        api_password: "{{ proxmox_password }}"
        node: "NODE NAME HERE"
        name: "fedora-demo-server"
        vmid: 120
        memory: 4096
        cores: 2
        cpu: "host"
        ostype: "l26"
        agent: enabled=1
        net:
          net0: "virtio,bridge=vmbr0"
        virtio:
          virtio0: "local-lvm:32"
        ide:
          ide2: "local:iso/Fedora-Server-netinst-x86_64-41-1.4.iso,media=cdrom"
        serial:
          serial0: "socket"
        vga: "serial0"
        boot: "order=ide2;virtio0"
        bootdisk: "virtio0"
        ciuser: "demo"
        cipassword: "demo123"
        citype: "nocloud"
        ipconfig:
          ipconfig0: "ip=dhcp"
        sshkeys: "{{ ssh_key.content | b64decode | trim }}"
        state: present

    - name: Start VM
      community.general.proxmox_kvm:
        api_host: "{{ proxmox_host }}"
        api_user: "{{ proxmox_user }}"
        api_password: "{{ proxmox_password }}"
        node: "NODE NAME HERE"
        vmid: 120
        state: started