VMware: community plan

VMware community ideas, concerns, solutions

This document lists various items discussed for future development

Feel free to add your ideas, concerns, solutions to this list.

Major problems

• We lack experienced VMware people with a deep understanding of VMware internals
  • Although we seem to have a very large/interested community, only 3 people are active
  • We need help in reviewing code and help with design decisions and implementation
  • As a result the breaking folder-changes may not actually the best way forward, but it will ship in v2.4...
• Quality of VMware modules is lacking
  • We have no real infrastructure for testing (no ESXi, no vCenter...)
    • vcsim has a lot of limitations -- details
  • A lot of VMware modules are not idempotent or do not support check-mode -- details
  • Most VMware modules lack integration tests -- details
• There is no holistic view to VMware support
  • How do we expect users to manage their VMware and vCenter infrastructure (What are we working towards ?)
  • What modules do we lack to cover this ?
  • How are modules supposed to work together (common functionality, standard interfaces, parameters, result values)

Other problems and limitations

• There is no module to generate content of a virtual floppy or virtual cd image, to provide files to the guest in a very early state (e. g. VMXNet3 or the Para virtual driver while bein in the os setup screen)

Ansible v2.4 freeze - Done

• Adding support for configuring a CD-rom iso image #28155
• Added folder and datacenter to the examples #25221

Module development

• We are making changes between versions which break backward compatibility, as a result playbooks will only work for a single Ansible release, and porting them can be a huge task. -- example
• What to do with the Chaperone Ansible modules from VMware at https://github.com/vmware/ansible-modules-extras-gpl3 (dagwieers)

Documentation

• A separate VMware related section for users, and one for developers would be useful.

Clean up actions

• Start tracking which modules do no have integration tests yet - Tracker
• Start tracking which modules should be adapted to latest capabilities of module_utils/vmware.py