vmware_vm_inventory: support fetching tag category

[harrymitchinson]

SUMMARY

In vmware_vm_inventory we can fetch tags from Virtual Machines however we cannot fetch the categories which these tags belong to, this leads to tags with missing context as to what they actually belong to and how they should be grouped.

The tags returned by the inventory plugin are in the form of an array like:

{ 
  "tags": [ "prd", "loadbalancer", "vsphere", "ansible", "pci", "pulumi" ]
}

This would be more useful if the tags were a dictionary/map, using the tag category as the key like:

{ 
  "tags": {
      "environment": "prd",
      "network": "pci",
      "service": "loadbalancer",
      // etc..
   }
}

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Idea

COMPONENT NAME

vmware_vm_inventory

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

plugin: "community.vmware.vmware_vm_inventory"
strict: false
hostname: vcenter.local
validate_certs: false
with_tags: true
keyed_groups:
  - key: tags
    prefix: "vmware_tag_"
    separator: ""
hostnames:
  - config.name
groups:
  vmware: true
filters:
  - "'ansible' in tags"
  - "'prd' in tags"
  - runtime.powerState == "poweredOn"

The above could become:

plugin: "community.vmware.vmware_vm_inventory"
strict: false
hostname: vcenter.local
validate_certs: false
with_tags: true
keyed_groups:
  - key: tags
    prefix: "vmware_tag_"
    separator: ""
  - key: tags.project
    prefix: "vmware_tag_project_"
    separator: ""
  - key: tags.service
    prefix: "vmware_tag_service_"
    separator: ""
  - key: tags.network
    prefix: "vmware_tag_network_"
    separator: ""
hostnames:
  - config.name
groups:
  vmware: true
filters:
  - tags.manager == "ansible"
  - tags.environment == "prd"
  - runtime.powerState == "poweredOn"

This would then allow us to create groups with more context such as vmware_tag_service_nginx or vmware_tag_network_pci etc.

[ansibullbot]

Files identified in the description:

• plugins/inventory/vmware_vm_inventory.py

If these files are inaccurate, please update the component name section of the description or use the !component bot command.

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[ansibullbot]

cc @Akasurde @Tomorrow9 @goneri @pgbidkar @warthog9
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[Akasurde]

@harrymitchinson Thanks for suggesting this feature.

I would like to discuss this before implementing the following things -

1. We have to support the existing tags fact for backward compatability, so we need to add a new key for new fact gathered with category. What is good key name? I am thinking about categories, tag_category, advance_tag and tag_categories etc.
2. What happens when we have same category name ? like two different tags with same category.

Let me know your views.