Proxmox VE container admin via Ansible and Ascender
With many teams weighing alternatives to VMware, this demo shows how automation makes hypervisor administration look the same no matter which platform sits underneath. Greg Sowell compares the vCenter and Proxmox VE interfaces, then turns to Ascender, where two job templates, one for VMware and one for Proxmox, each present a survey that prompts for a guest name and an action: provision, start, stop or delete. The survey answers are passed into the playbook as extra vars.
Both playbooks are walked through side by side. The Proxmox version clones a template, pauses ten seconds and starts the new guest, and uses a vm_action variable with conditionals to decide which task runs; deleting stops the guest first so the API can catch up. Along the way the video introduces YAML anchors, aliases and overrides, a way to define the Proxmox authentication block once and reuse it in every proxmox_kvm module call while still adding parameters.
After provisioning test-rocky9 on both hypervisors, the demo stops and deletes the guests from Ascender to show the loop end to end. Viewers considering a hypervisor change see how the same survey-driven experience, and any ITSM integration through Ascender's API, carries over unchanged from VMware to Proxmox or oVirt.
Key takeaways
- Ascender surveys prompt for a guest name and an action, then pass the answers into the playbook as extra vars at launch.
- The Proxmox playbook clones a template, waits ten seconds, then starts the guest because Proxmox does not start new guests by default.
- A single vm_action variable with conditionals decides whether the provision, start, stop or delete task runs.
- YAML anchors, aliases and the override syntax let one authentication block be reused across every proxmox_kvm module call.
- The VMware and Proxmox playbooks are nearly identical in structure, so switching hypervisors changes little in the automation.
- Driving hypervisors through Ascender's API keeps the user experience the same for ITSM requests regardless of the platform behind them.
Questions this video answers
Can Ansible and Ascender manage Proxmox VE the same way as VMware?
Yes. The demo runs nearly identical playbooks against both, each launched from an Ascender survey that asks for a guest name and whether to provision, start, stop or delete it. The Proxmox version uses the proxmox_kvm module while the VMware version uses VMware modules, but the structure and user experience match.
What are YAML anchors, aliases and overrides in an Ansible playbook?
An anchor marks a block of YAML, such as Proxmox authentication parameters, as a reusable reference. An alias pastes that block elsewhere, and adding the override syntax merges it into a module call while letting you add or override parameters. It is a YAML feature, not an Ansible one, and shortens repetitive authentication sections.
How does the playbook delete a Proxmox guest?
When the action is delete, the playbook first stops the guest, pauses briefly so the Proxmox API can catch up, then issues the delete. Watching the Proxmox console during the run shows the guest being force stopped before it is removed.
This video is part of the Ascender Pro playlist. Browse every CIQ video by product and topic.
Transcript
hey everybody I'm Greg Sowell and welcome to another ciq demo today I'm going to be showing you using anable and Ascender to automate hypervisors so there's been a lot of chatter lately about uh Alternatives perhaps to VMware so I thought I would show how we automate well one VMware but also some of the Alternatives and I'm going to be using proxmox today but this could be your hypervisor of choice right so maybe you do hyperv or overt or really anything else it's probably going to look and operate very similarly so let's uh take a look at my VMware console really quick if you
are familiar with uh V center right you've got all of your machines in here I've got all my various acutron storage cluster information all that good stuff is in here and I can see kind of uh snapshots for these hosts all right or rather these guest VMS I can see all their snapshots I can go into their console I can right click on them start stop edit the settings all that good stuff's there if you've never seen prox MOX this is what it looks like feels familiar right I've got my information down here I've got all of my data center right so that's going to
be my cluster here's my individual uh hypervisors and then I've got uh VMS inside right now I don't have any we're going to create some here momentarily but I've got say my templates I rightclick on stuff right I can rightclick create the new VMS I can edit settings all that stuff feels very familiar so while the interface feels familiar moving around I wanted to show you what it can look like to automate against them so in here in my Ascender I'm going to go to my template section and again Ascender is our uh automation our Enterprise automation platform that allows you to kind of securely
uh create and share automation inside of here so I'm going to do my uh VMware let's go to my VMware one first so VMware control I wrote A playbook and I'll take a look at them here in just a moment so you can kind of juxtapose the two uh to do some VMware control so this one again this is kind of demo purposes you probably wouldn't necessarily do it in this specific way but I can click the launch button over here and it pops up what we call a survey and so a survey is the ability for you to really quickly easily build all this
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information you see here to prompt the user to hey fill in the blanks and let's build something or let's do something so I can go and I can get a bunch of information so here I'm allowing them to choose what they want to do with this VM provision start it stop it delete it so I'm going to provision it because it doesn't exists yet and so uh test- rocky9 I can fill in the blanks on all this good stuff right that's going to pick out hard drive size and how many CPUs all that good stuff I'm going to click next I'm going to click launch
and Off to the Races it's going to go and it's going to build all that stuff now I want to do the exact same thing for proxmox so let me find my proxmox template I got it right here VMware or rather proxmox VM control I'm going to launch it and again I have a survey you can see I paired this one down I don't have nearly as much information in the Playbook I have Provisions for say number of uh virtual sockets CPUs all that stuff so I can customize the networking and I could add that to my survey but I just wanted to kind of
keep it little succinct and and clean uh here for this one so again I've got all the exact same options provision start stop delete that I've created now just because I only have four things in here doesn't mean there's only four things you can do I'm just trying to keep this simple right there's so much more you can do with this automation virtually anything you need to do to the template to the virtual machine I can do all those things through automation so I'm going to build a test- rocky9 on my prox MOX as as well I'm going to click next and really when I
click next what it's doing is it's presenting me with all the information basically here's all the variables that I'm passing in and essentially that's what the survey does it takes those variables and it just passes them into the Playbook as extra bars so I'm going to go ahead and click launch and it should be often running I'm going to jump over to the job section and I can see the status of all my currently running jobs so my uh VMware control is currently running right now my proxmox one is going to be running here here shortly as well as these things complete I'm going to
pop over here and I'm going to show you a couple of the playbooks so here is the prox MOX Playbook really essentially I have a variable section up at the top where I am setting kind of some defaults most of these I actually override but I like putting all of my variables up at the top so that I can kind of see them it's just sort of um documentation purposes even though I'm override them I like putting them up at the top with all the uh kind of default information or some extra information about what I'm going to be doing with this stuff and then
down here in my task section you can see here's me building excuse me the VM itself I'm really just cloning and I'm telling it what template to clone and I'm filling out some extra information in here and it will build it so in proxmox whenever you build a new VM it doesn't start it by default so I have it uh provision it it's going to pause for 10 seconds and then it'll go ahead and start that VM up and also with these start and stop tasks essentially what I'm doing is I'm setting a variable called vmore action and I'm using conditionals to determine oh do
I run this do I run this which task am I actually going to run so I've got start stop delete in there as well uh for the delete action I actually have to stop it really quick pause just for a second so the API can catch up and then go ahead and do that delete action now looking at this you might see something you're unfamiliar with and it's something my uh boy Nick just taught me it's called anchors aliases and overrides and it's something built into yaml I'm not going to go too down or rather too deep too far down the rabbit hole on it
but I just wanted to kind of introduce the concept A little bit so you have something called an anchor and if you look right here under this proxmox off variable I have in the variable section I have an anchor so it's got the ET sign and then a name the name for the anchor right here I have it the same name as the proxmox unor off variable it doesn't necessarily have to be it could be something else but what an anchor essentially says is everything underneath this anchor I'm using it as a reference point right so um I can come back to this uh via
an alias somewhere else and I'm just going to basically take this chunk I'm going to paste it in somewhere else so it's slightly different because if I take a look at this section right here so this proxmox KVM module you can see I have commented out API user password host that's uh variables that are expected to be in here so I can't just Define those variables somewhere else those parameters the module itself expects those to be there and if they're not there the module is going to air out it needs those to be in there so they can't just be defined somewhere else but what
I can do is I can have an anchor so you see Aster proxmox unor off that's uh or rather that's an alias so I'm referencing that anchor so it basically says take that information and put it under here now if you just put that it doesn't allow you to add any additional parameters underneath right it says this is it in its entirety but if you add the less than two less than symbols in a colon it gives you the override ability so it says hey put all that inside of here right and this is all a Amo function it has nothing to do with anible
put all that information that we had in the anchor right here but also allow me to add extra parameters and even override some of the stuff that's coming in so that's exactly what we're doing here so you can see instead of having kind of potentially a lengthy authentication section I can just distill that down to one IND individual um uh override statement override and Alias right you can see it there there there I have it for all of these uh proxmox KVM um module calls for each one of these tasks so pretty cool little feature now that you are familiar with seeing what it looks
like in proxmox right we have our start stop the provision all those pieces this is the VMware version so it looks very similar does it not up at the top I have all the variables that defining for the host you can see right there I have an alias for VMware authentication I'm using that uh functionality again you can see here I'm doing it with uh four uh specific parameters parameters let me say that correctly down here I'm actually doing the VMware provision again it's chunkier just like in proxmox because I'm filling in the blanks on some various extra pieces of information after that I have
my start stop and delete right so nothing to crazy or complex they're both pretty succinct pretty simple and they operate essentially the same functionality wise so let me pop into my Ascender here I can see everything is completed so I'm going to pop over here scroll down a little bit there's my test rocky9 host I'm going to pop over to proxmox there's my test Rocky 9 host over here as well and again I can go to the console I can check on snapshots I can do all that information or all that configuration from right here inside the interface just like you would on VMware now that it's all completed say for example I want
to uh pause one of the VMware VMS so the one we just created I want to stop it I'll pause it but I'm just going to stop it in here so I could go to the template section and I could find the job template or I could come in here to one of the previous runs of vmw VM control and in the detail section I can actually click on the job template there there's a lot of shortcuts about moving around in the interface and so you can get to a lot of the information from a lot of different places so I'm just going to cheat
and take that quick shortcut because I was already there so I'm going to go ahead and launch that and instead of provision I'm going to say stop so I want to stop that VM it doesn't matter that I'm passing over a lot of extra variables if they need to be used they will if they don't they won't here in this case really all that needed was what uh what VM you know what's the name of the VM that we actually want to stop if I wanted to do that in proxmox it would be essentially the same action but say for example I want to go
ahead and do some cleanup so I'm going to go ahead and go to Output you can see stopped the VM it changed so that VM is stopped in VMware now I want to instead so I'm going to click on details VMware control I want to go ahead and delete it and it will delete this in about 40 seconds so I'm going to click next I'm going to click launch you know what I want to go ahead and clean up my prox MOX as well so I'm going to go to the template section I'm going to find my proxmox job template I'm going to launch that
I'm going to say you know what provision go ahead and delete that test Rocky 9 pm click next click launch and it should be off and running let me pop over the jobs section here you can see that the VMware one already completed the proxmox one is completing now so I should be able to come over here to my VMware V spere client and see that it is gone there and in here it's currently deleting you see first it's forced stopping it so it's going to stop that VM and then shortly thereafter stopped it's going to delay I believe 10 seconds and then it'll go
ahead and clean this up so as you can see it's actually really easy to uh administer your uh hypervisors it doesn't really matter matter which one it is right I could actually go in here I could make modifications to this I could change hard drive size I have some blog post and demos showing me um detecting that uh I don't know a drive in a Windows machine is uh having problems so it actually goes pause a VMS expands the drive cranks it back up connects into the Windows machine and then I go ahead and expand to consume the rest of that so you can really
do virtually anything you can imagine inside of your hypervisors using this this automation stuff it's pretty wacky Wild and the interface can feel seamless right so going from VMware to proxmox or overts right using their interfaces can feel a little bit different using automation it can feel seamless right it feels the same it can integrate into your workflows just the same right so those things don't have to seemingly change and if you use uh say Ascender's API and you've got um I don't know an itm like service now if somebody orders a VM the user experience doesn't have to change if it is connecting
to VMware and configuring it there or connecting to proxmox configuring it there or overt so administrative wise it really keeps those things the same so my next steps on this I think I want to show how we can actually use automation to migrate VMS from VMware over to proxmox I think that would actually be uh a pretty interesting use case so I have in the past uh if you look up some of my blog post and video I have one on doing kind of manual migration where I stand up a new VM I back up the configurations from the old and I and I build
over here so you could do it that way but I think it would be interesting to take say a rocky 9 uh VM that's in VMware and push that over to proxmox right so instead of rebuilding anything we're just going to kind of migrate those things so I'm I'm thinking about that let me know if you're interested in that and if I should put any time into it also at this point I like to ask if you have any questions or com comments or you can see yourself using this in your environment which you tweak and tune it and change it in some specific way
I would love to hear from you um if you have any other use cases or demos you'd like to see I would love to hear those too we are great at Professional Services here at ciq so we' love to come in and help folks not only stand up their automation infrastructure but also help them do say migrations and things like that help you build those automations help you kind of get off the Runway get that plane in the air you know we can kind of help you get moving so thanks and if nothing else we will see you next time happy automating bye
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