A set of Ansible Playbooks that help automate the deployment of vCenter, nested ESXi, NSX-T Manager, and NSX-T Edge nodes.

1. Description
2. Setup
   • Dependencies
   • Answerfile.yml
3. Diagram
4. Usage
5. Compatibility
6. Development
7. Credits

This repository contains a set of Ansible Playbooks that deploy and configure vCenter, nested ESXi, NSX-T Manager, and NSX-T Edge nodes.

Now updated for vSphere 7.0 and NSX-T 3.0. Also verified to work with vSphere 6.7 and NSX-T 2.5.1 (just swap the ISOs/OVAs).
Tested in an environment with at least one physical ESXi hosts managed by vCenter.

Other components used that are not part of this deployment are a FRRouting VM for routing within the nested environment and an NFS datastore availabe to the nested ESXi hosts. vSAN could be used too, but I have not tested this yet.

I also recommend having a DNS/NTP/AD server available to the nested environment to host something like a "lab.local" zone and have proper time synchronization.

Below a simple diagram over the physical environment. This will be deployed on the physical ESXi host using the default settings in answerfile.yml

apt install ansible
apt install sshpass python-pip git
pip install vim
pip install pyvmomi

ESXi and VCSA ISOs (6.7 or 7.0) as well as the NSX-T Manager and NSX-T Edge OVAs (2.5 or 3.0). Place all of these in the /iso directory of your Ansible control node.

Edit and adjust the answerfile.yml according to your needs! I've parameterized as much as possible so it's easier to customize your deployment.

ansible-playbook deploy.yml

Ansible => 2.7 is required
ESXi version 6.7 and above is supported
VCSA version 6.7 and above is supported
NSX-T version 2.5 and above is supported

TODO: Configure stuff in NSX-T
TODO: Include more diagrams in README.md
TODO: Clean up / structurize answerfile.yml
TODO: Parameterize more

Credits go to Yasen Simeonov and his project at https://github.com/yasensim/vsphere-lab-deploy. This project is largely based on his.