Getting started

The debops.libvirt role is designed to use your normal admin account instead of a root account for managing libvirt via it's API. That way Ansible can access your own SSH keys through ssh-agent if necessary to connect to the remote libvirtd instances.

You should still use debops.libvirt with the become: True option in your playbooks, it will automatically run tasks unprivileged when needed.

Because an unprivileged account is used, the role won't work correctly if that account does not belong to the libvirt group. On the Ansible Controller this requires that the user needs to log out and back in before the new group takes effect. This role will check if the required group is present and won't run libvirt tasks otherwise to not stop the playbook unnecessarily.

Use via local connection

By default debops.libvirt will try to connect to a libvirtd system instance on localhost. Your user should be in the libvirt system group to be able to do this. The debops.libvirtd role configures this automatically.

Network and storage pool configuration without specified item.uri parameter applies to default connection. If your main libvirtd daemon is on a different host, you can change the default connection using the libvirt__default_uri variable.

Use via remote connections

You can use debops.libvirt from your Ansible Controller host to centrally configure libvirtd instances on remote hosts.

Use the libvirt__connections dict variable to specify libvirt URI connections with aliases, they will be configured in ~/.config/libvirt/libvirt.conf on the account you use to run Ansible. After that, in each network or storage pool definition add item.uri parameter with the name of the connection to use for that definition.

Example inventory

To run this role directly on libvirtd servers, they should be included in the [debops_libvirt] Ansible group:

[debops_service_libvirt]
hostname

If you want to use this role on your Ansible Controller, put it in the same group as well:

[debops_service_libvirt]
hostname ansible_connection=local

Example playbook

Here's an example playbook which uses the debops.libvirt role:

---

- name: Manage libvirt hosts
  hosts: [ 'debops_service_libvirt' ]
  become: True

  roles:
    - role: debops.libvirt
      tags: [ 'role::libvirt' ]

Ansible tags

You can use Ansible --tags or --skip-tags parameters to limit what tasks are performed during Ansible run. This can be used after the host is first configured to speed up playbook execution, when you are sure that most of the configuration has not been changed.

Available role tags:

role::libvirt
Main role tag, should be used in the playbook to execute all of the role tasks as well as role dependencies.
role::libvirt:networks
Configure libvirt networks.
role::libvirt:pools
Configure libvirt storage pools.