“A 3,000-line single Ansible playbook is impossible to debug. Modularizing code into clean Ansible Galaxy roles makes infrastructure maintainable and reusable.”

In our early iterations of automated SDDC lab deployments at NTT Data, all tasks (vCenter deployment, ESXi setup, NSX-T configuration) were housed in a single monolithic deploy.yml file.

Refactoring Monolithic Playbooks into Modular Collections

We refactored the entire repository into modular Ansible roles and external collection requirements (requirements.yml).

• deploynestedInfra.yml: Deploys nested ESXi hypervisors and vCenter.
• deploynsxtInfra.yml: Instantiates NSX-T Manager and configures Edge Cluster switches.
• undeploy.yml: Gracefully powers off and purges target pods.

[!IMPORTANT] Separate infrastructure state parameters (answerfile.yml) completely from task execution logic (playbooks/).

# # requirements.yml for Modular SDDC Automation
collections:
  - name: community.vmware
    version: 3.2.0
  - name: community.general
    version: 5.0.0
  - name: ansible.posix
    version: 1.4.0

The Verdict

Key Takeaway

Decouple Infrastructure Parameters from Task Execution Roles.

Structure automation repos into modular Ansible Galaxy roles, separating environment variables (answerfile.yml) from execution tasks.