Automating Rocky Linux VM Provisioning with Ansible on KVM Hypervisor

June 19, 2025

Intro

I absolutely love KVM hypervisor! It’s free and has a great CLI interface which makes it easier to automate things.

It also comes with a very powerful virt-install utility, which eliminates the need to use third-party tools like Packer.

When combined with tools like Ansible and kickstart, virt-install makes VM provisioning a breeze.

Keep in mind the qemu connection type and current user group memberships. A user must be a member of libvirt group in order to leverage system connections without root privileges.
```
virt-install --connect qemu:///session # local user session
virt-install --connect qemu:///system # system wide session
```
Make sure you have write access to the directory where the virtual drive will be created. File access control list (FACL) is one way to manage it.
```
# mkdir /var/lib/libvirt/images/test
# setfact -R -m u:<your-user>:rwX
```
Make sure user libvirt-qemu has read permissions to the location where the OS ISO is stored.

Host OS: Debian 12
RAM: enough for your needs
Storage: enough for your needs
CPU Cores: the more the better
current user account is a part of libvirt group
```
# usermod -G libvirt -a <your_user>
```

Note conventions:
- $: normal user shell
- >: Python venv shell
- all Ansible commands are run from Python venv

Ansible isntalled on the host via pip

$ python3 -m venv ~/ansible_env
$ source ~/ansible_env/bin/acivate
> pip install --upgrade pip
> pip install ansible ansible-dev-tools

install the role (wihtout -p, the default install location is: ~/.ansible/roles)

mkdir roles
ansible-glaxy role install -p roles git+https://github.com/vladstechblog/role-provision-rocky10-kvm-vm.git

at this point your directory structure should look like this:

.
|-- my_playbook_to_invoke_role.yml
`-- roles
    `-- role-provision-rocky10-kvm-vm

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