I've been running a server at home for a few years and gone through many iterations of hardware and different software/virtualization stacks. On this iteration I landed on Proxmox which supports LXC, an interesting virtualization technology.
Now, I have been a fan of IaC and I wanted to learn Ansible for a while. I'd prefer Terraform but the Terraform module for Proxmox did not work very well when I tried it a while ago, so it's a good opportunity for me to try Ansible!
This blog series is my learning notes for using Ansible to provision LXCs (and a few VMs) and configure the software/service running in said LXCs.
Or so I thought - the series is no more, but I'm keeping the "Part 1" in the title just for the lols, here is what happened:
Step 1, I create a snippet to quickly get an LXC up, it looks like this:
- name: test playbook
hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Create new container with minimal options
community.general.proxmox:
vmid: 200
node: my-proxmox-node
api_user: ansible-usr@pve
api_password: 123
api_host: 192.168.x.x
hostname: test-lxc
password: 456
ostemplate: 'local:vztmpl/ubuntu-24.04-standard_24.04-2_amd64.tar.zst'
storage: local-lvm
Then I run ansible-playbook playbook.yml to create the LXC. So far, so good.
Step 2, the LXC is up and running but the config is quite loose. I'd like to tighten it up a bit. I add disk_volume block to the template, replacing storage. As per example in the documentation
- name: test playbook
hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Create new container with minimal options
community.general.proxmox:
vmid: 200
node: my-proxmox-node
api_user: ansible-usr@pve
api_password: 123
api_host: 192.168.x.x
hostname: test-lxc
password: 456
ostemplate: 'local:vztmpl/ubuntu-24.04-standard_24.04-2_amd64.tar.zst'
disk_volume:
storage: local-lvm
size: 20
What could possibly go wrong?
Step 3, Ansible complains: "disk_volume is not a valid parameter". Huh? But the doc contains the definition and examples, how could...oh, "added in community.general 9.2.0", I see. Let me upgrade my local Ansible version.
Step 3.5 I'll spare you (and myself!) the details of me trying to figure out my local module's version, things are already bad enough.
Step 4, now the error message is something like "400 Bad Request, disk_volume is not defined in schema". OK, maybe I need to upgrade and reboot my Proxmox installation as well. Too bad though, next step please!
Step 5, OK I've given up on trying to make disk_volume work. Let me revert that property and move on to the next thing, adding cores property to limit the CPU resource.
- name: test playbook
hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Create new container with minimal options
community.general.proxmox:
vmid: 200
node: my-proxmox-node
api_user: ansible-usr@pve
api_password: 123
api_host: 192.168.x.x
hostname: test-lxc
password: 456
ostemplate: 'local:vztmpl/ubuntu-24.04-standard_24.04-2_amd64.tar.zst'
storage: local-lvm
cores: 4
Works like a charm. If we just ignore the whole disk_volume thing for a second...
Step 6, I want to try updating the LXC through Ansible. I change cores from 4 to 6, save, rerun, surely this should update my LXC's CPU to 6, right? Right?
PLAY RECAP **********************************************************************************************************************
localhost : ok=2 changed=0 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0
Step 7, I think it's time to revisit Terraform. Wish me luck!
Top comments (2)
No... when the lxc is already there, then it won't update anything. There is a separate option 'update' for that. Breaking the whole omnipotence idea of Ansible :-( Annoying...
By the way, I see you wanted to have a 20G disk in the earlier version of the playbook. How did you do that when disk_volume didn't work?
Oh... just after I posted this I found out that this works
disk: <storage>:<size>Wow, finally, after hours of struggling the same way you were