Quickstart

After installing the collection outlined in the installation guide, you can access the collection and the ansible-doc covered in the following topics:

ibm.powervc

After the collection is installed, you can access the collection content for a playbook by referencing the namespace ibm and the collection’s fully qualified name powervc. For example:

- name: VM Capture Playbook
  hosts: all
  gather_facts: no
  vars:
   auth:
    auth_url: https://{{ PowerVC }}:5000/v3
    project_name: '{{ powervc_project }}'
    username: '{{ powervc_user }}'
    password: '{{ powervc_password }}'
    project_domain_name: Default
    user_domain_name: Default
  tasks:
     - name: Perform VM Capture Operations
       ibm.powervc.capture_vm:
          auth: "{{ auth }}"
          name: "ansible_vm"
          image_name: "test_Image"
          validate_certs: no
       register: result
     - debug:
          var: result

In Ansible 2.14.0, the collections keyword was added to reduce the need to refer to the collection repeatedly. For example, you can use the collections keyword in your playbook:

ansible-doc

Modules included in this collection provide additional documentation that is similar to a UNIX-like operating system man page (manual page). This documentation can be accessed from the command line by using the ansible-doc command.

Here’s how to use the ansible-doc command after you install the IBM PowerVC collection: ansible-doc ibm.powervc.capture_vm

For more information on using the ansible-doc command, refer to the Ansible guide.

Connection Method

Ansible communicates with remote machines over the SSH protocol. By default, Ansible uses native OpenSSH and connects to remote machines and communicates from the control node via SSH tunnel.

In case of PowerVC collection, it uses an API-based execution model in this case, the Ansible collection should use the local connection type, meaning all API calls are made from the control node rather than running code on the PowerVC host.