Welcome & the Lab

Ansible for Proxmox VE · Dutch Proxmox Day 2026

credativ GmbH

Alexander Wirt & credativ

Alexander Wirt

• CTO & Co-Owner, credativ (at credativ since 2004)
• Open Source since 1998
• Debian Developer since 2003 (formorer)
• Focus: Linux infrastructure, Debian, automation & Proxmox VE
• alexander.wirt@credativ.de

credativ

• Open Source consulting & support since 1999
• 24/7/365 enterprise operations & support
• Debian, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Ceph, Proxmox VE
• Independent, vendor-neutral engineering

Keep the intro under 60 seconds: who you are, what credativ does (pure open source support & consulting), then get straight into the lab.

The plan

01	Ansible in 30 minutes — inventory, ad-hoc, idempotency	30
02	Your first playbook — repositories, packages, time	30
03	Forming the cluster — what the title promises	40
	Break	10
04	From playbook to role — structure that survives	25
05	Operating the cluster — storage, users, a guest	45
06	Dynamic inventory — the cluster describes itself	10
07	Where to go next	5

Say the arc out loud: bottom to top, three unconfigured nodes at the start, a working Ansible project at the end. Roughly half the time is theirs.

Set expectations: this is hands-on. Roughly half the time is exercise work. Nobody has to have seen Ansible before. Ask who has written a playbook and adjust module 01 length; if more than half raise a hand, compress 01 and move the time into 05.

Do not promise the schedule to the minute. Module 03 is the one that must not be cut.

What we leave out

• No general Ansible deep dive: we cover what this setup requires
• No high availability, Ceph, or complex SDN
• No production secret management in the lab (simple variables for speed)

Those are topics for dedicated follow-ups.

Your lab

Machine	Role	Address
desktop	Ansible control node (your desktop)	192.168.0.254
pve01	Proxmox VE node 1 → cluster primary	192.168.0.1
pve02	Proxmox VE node 2	192.168.0.2
pve03	Proxmox VE node 3	192.168.0.3

Log in as root with the password password123 — the same on all three nodes, for SSH and for the web GUI on :8006.

Every participant has an identical, isolated set.

Say it explicitly: the set is theirs alone and isolated, so they can break it as much as they like. People hold back otherwise.

Set up your desktop

Everything is on the share already mounted on your desktop. Run it once:

~/Desktop/workshop/deploy.sh

• ~/ansible-proxmox — the project you work in
• ~/ansible-venv — Ansible with the Proxmox collection, put on your PATH
• ~/workshop-slides — these slides
• an SSH key, installed on all three nodes, so nothing asks you for a password

Then open a new terminal, or the PATH change is not in effect.

Where the sheets are

~/Desktop/workshop/index.html

Open it once and keep the tab. Every module has a handout — the reference, with more detail than these slides — and an exercise sheet. That page links all of them, plus the cheat sheet and the bonus exercises.

Checkpoint before we start

On desktop, in a terminal:

ansible --version              # expect core 2.17 or newer
ansible-galaxy collection list community.proxmox
ssh root@192.168.0.1 'pveversion'

No password and no host key question: deploy.sh handled both. If any of these fail, say so now.

If ansible --version looks wrong

Ansible runs from a virtualenv on this desktop, and it should already be on your PATH. If the version is older than 2.17, or community.proxmox is missing, you are using the system Ansible instead:

which ansible                       # expect ~/ansible-venv/bin/ansible
source ~/ansible-venv/bin/activate  # only if it is not

Why a virtualenv: the collection community.proxmox 2.x needs a newer proxmoxer than Debian ships, and the packaged collection is missing two modules we use.

You do not have to type everything

~/ansible-proxmox is not an empty directory:

cd ~/ansible-proxmox
ansible-playbook playbooks/00-check.yml

• inventory and configuration are complete; the addresses are the same for everyone
• every playbook is a skeleton with the right task names and structure, and a TODO where the content goes

Writing the files yourself works too. The exercise sheets contain everything either way.

Trainer notes

• Timing: 15 min including the checkpoint.
• Run the checkpoint together, one command at a time.
• Common issues:
  • ansible missing or too old → requires ansible-core ≥ 2.17
  • which ansible points at /usr/bin/ansible → the venv is not on PATH. Everything after module 02 will fail on missing modules. Fix it before you start.
  • Collection not installed → ansible-galaxy collection install community.proxmox
  • ssh root@192.168.0.1 still asks for a password → deploy.sh could not reach the node at the time. Rerunning it installs the key.
• Fallback for bad venue network: Switch to demonstration mode immediately on the projector.