Dynamic inventory for VMware in Ansible

I'd probably use the EC2 dynamic inventory script instead, which you can employ by configuring ec2.ini and passing -i ec2.py to ansible-playbook.

See http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_dynamic_inventory.html#example-aws-ec2-external-inventory-script for more info.

Note that there are plenty of options in ec2.ini. Be sure to have a look at those, e.g. cache_max_age. You can also make the inventory generation faster by filtering unnecessary resources (e.g. set rds = False if you are only interested in EC2 instances).

UPDATE: With Ansible 2.x+ you can also use - meta: refresh_inventory mid-play.

The key thing that chef server provides over chef solo is the search ability, which can find servers/nodes based on a given query.

I understand not wanting to host your own chef server to gain this functionality! There are a lot of moving parts to provide it, erlang and rabbitmq and...

Luckily chef zero, or chef-client's --local mode as it's now known as, supports search and acts like a mini server of its own, only temporary.

It can read from json node/environment/role files in the right directory structure and act as the API endpoint until the chef run completes.

Given this structure, in addition to using search in recipes to find other nodes, it's possible to use knife search --local 'role:web-server AND chef_environment:production' to list matched nodes as well as knife ssh --local 'role:web-server AND chef_environment: production' 'ssh_command' to execute commands across all servers.

So, whilst this isn't exactly an ansible style dynamic inventory system, you can do a lot of things with it.