Managing VM Power State with Ansible

Introduction

Whether you’re scheduling routine maintenance, automating DR procedures, or managing lab environments, the ability to control VM power state is essential. With Ansible, you can automate VM power operations, start, stop, reboot, and validate, all from a single playbook.

My Personal Repository on GitHub

Nutanix Repository on GitHub

Diagram: VM Power Workflow

Use Case

• Gracefully power down VMs for patching
• Restart development environments daily
• Stop unused test VMs to save resources

Sample Variables: group_vars/all.yml

vm_power_map:
  web01: poweron
  db01: poweroff
  test01: restart

Playbook: vm_power_control.yml

- name: Control Nutanix VM power states
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false
  collections:
    - nutanix.ncp
  vars_files:
    - nutanix_credentials.yml
    - group_vars/all.yml
  tasks:

    - name: Control power state of VMs
      loop: "{{ vm_power_map | dict2items }}"
      loop_control:
        label: "{{ item.key }}"
      nutanix.ncp.vms:
        name: "{{ item.key }}"
        state: present
        power_state: "{{ item.value }}"
        cluster_name: "prod-cluster"

Supported Power States

• poweron
• poweroff
• restart
• pause (in some builds)

Run the Playbook

ansible-playbook vm_power_control.yml --ask-vault-pass -i inventory.yml

Optional Enhancements

• Add tags to control groupings (e.g., stop all “test” VMs)
• Validate state post-execution with register
• Integrate with a schedule or CI job

Summary

Controlling VM power state with Ansible gives your team more reliable workflows, improved energy efficiency, and the ability to automate daily environment resets or DR responses. Use this playbook to enforce consistency across dev, test, and prod AHV clusters.

External Documentation:

• nutanix.ncp.vms Module