Automating my Home lab with Ansible: Proxmox and Beyond

I will start with this – I am in NO way an Ansible expert nor do I present this as a tutorial. This is just a simple solution I found for my own home lab that I hope would be of use to others reading this 🙂

In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, managing a home lab efficiently is crucial for enthusiasts and professionals alike. Ansible, a powerful open-source automation tool, can be a game-changer in streamlining tasks and ensuring your home lab runs smoothly. In this guide, we’ll explore how to use Ansible to automate your home lab based on Proxmox, and we’ll also touch on how to extend these principles to cloud-based environments.

Before we dive into automation, we need to make sure that Proxmox is set up correctly. Install Proxmox on your hardware and configure your virtual machines (VMs) and containers to meet your specific needs.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ansible

For other operating systems, refer to the official Ansible documentation.

Configuring my Inventory

The inventory file is where you define the hosts (machines) you want Ansible to manage. By default, it’s located at /etc/ansible/hosts. Open it with a text editor and add the IP addresses or hostnames of your Proxmox nodes.

[proxmox]
proxmox01 ansible_ssh_host=192.168.1.10
proxmox02 ansible_ssh_host=192.168.1.11

No onto playbooks…
Ansible playbooks are the heart of automation. They define a set of tasks that should be executed on the target hosts. (That’s what the documentation says, don’t @ me! LOL)

So this would be a basic playbook structure that you could use for Ansible –
Create a directory structure for your playbooks:

mkdir -p ~/ansible/homelab

Inside this directory, create a playbook file (e.g., homelab.yml). (I’ll add the YAML file below so you can copy/paste it directly from here and edit it to your own need) …The basic structure looks like this:

---
- name: Homelab Automation
  hosts: proxmox
  tasks:
    - name: Task 1
      # Task details go here
    - name: Task 2
      # Task details go here

Automate Tasks

Ansible modules allow you to perform various tasks on your Proxmox hosts, such as managing VMs, containers, networks, and more. Refer to the Proxmox Ansible Modules documentation for detailed usage.

To run your playbook, use the following command:

ansible-playbook homelab.yml

Now that your home lab is automated, you can easily extend these principles to cloud-based environments.

Add Cloud Hosts to Inventory

Update your Ansible inventory file to include cloud hosts:

[cloud]
cloud01 ansible_ssh_host=your_cloud_ip

Make sure you have the necessary SSH keys or credentials set up for authentication.

Adapting Playbooks for Cloud Environments

Adjust your existing playbooks or create new ones tailored for cloud services. Ansible has a wide range of modules for managing cloud resources across providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more.

Running Playbooks in the Cloud

Execute your cloud playbooks in the same way you did for your home lab:

ansible-playbook cloud.yml

This is all I have for this little automation project, for now! >:D I’ll keep looking through the documentation and if I find other nifty things about this I’ll make a new post. Happy automating!