At our holiday home — a quiet place we visit just once or twice a year — I wanted to know exactly what’s happening there, even when we’re not around. Call it freak-control if you will, but when you have a heating system running through the winter and the power tends to drop every now […]

In the last post I proved the flow locally: Ansible talks to vCenter, clones from a template, and the VM comes up with our settings. That was the “manual gear.” Now I want the “automatic gear”—a GitLab pipeline that runs the same steps for me, consistently, from any commit. My goals are simple: keep secrets

In this post we move from lab setup to hands-on automation. The goal is to provision virtual machines on vSphere automatically by combining Ansible playbooks with a GitLab CI/CD pipeline. Everything lives as code in a Git repository: VM definitions, playbooks, and the pipeline that runs them. With a single commit, GitLab triggers Ansible, which

A few months ago, when I first came across a project where Ansible and GitLab CI/CD were used to automate VM deployments in VMware vCenter, I wasn’t directly responsible for writing the playbooks. My role was more on the VMware side — managing vCenter, handling ESXi administration, and preparing the YAML host files that Ansible