Change VMTools Upgrade Policy with Ansible

For any familiar with PowerCLI, this is one of the first scripts someone may learn. It is just long enough to need more than one-liner, but short enough to feel like you don’t need to be an expert. Here is one I posted on this site over a decade ago:

param([string]$servers)
 
$spec= new-object vmware.vim.virtualmachineconfigspec
$spec.tools=new-object vmware.vim.toolsconfiginfo
$spec.tools.toolsupgradepolicy ="upgradeatpowercycle"
 
$vms= get-vm $servers
Foreach($vm in $vms){
$view=$vm|get-view
$view.reconfigvm($spec)
}

I share this so we have a baseline when looking at the Ansible version.

---
- name: Update VMTools Upgrade Policy
  hosts: vcenters
  gather_facts: no
  collections:
    - vmware.vmware_rest
  tasks:
    - name: Get all VMs
      vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_vm_info:
        vcenter_hostname: "{{ inventory_hostname }}"
        vcenter_username: "{{ vcenter_username }}"
        vcenter_password: "{{ vcenter_passwords[inventory_hostname] }}"
        vcenter_validate_certs: no
      delegate_to: localhost
      register: vms

    - name: Change VMTools upgrade policy to UPGRADE_AT_POWER_CYCLE
      vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_vm_tools:
        vcenter_hostname: "{{ inventory_hostname }}"
        vcenter_username: "{{ vcenter_username }}"
        vcenter_password: "{{ vcenter_passwords[inventory_hostname] }}"
        vcenter_validate_certs: no
        vm: "{{ item.vm }}"
        upgrade_policy: UPGRADE_AT_POWER_CYCLE
      register: _result
      delegate_to: localhost
      loop:
        "{{vms.value}}"

The two tasks here are straightforward even though they look and feel a more complicated than the PowerCLI version.

The first tasks gathers all the VMs in vCenter, and the second tasks changes the VMtools upgrade policy so VMtools upgrades during a reboot. That’s it.

Ansible’s benefit over PowerCLi is it can allow non-technical user to run pre-written playbooks very easily with little knowledge needed. Would I suggest everyone start transcribing all the Powershell/PowerCLI scripts to Ansible? Definitely not! But I do think exercises like this are important for learning Ansible or anything new as when we take a process or a script with which we are already familiar, it makes understanding the new tool or process that much easier.

Enjoy