Ansible integration in VMware Aria Automation uses WinRM HTTPS 5986 port for connections with Windows VMs

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

When you provision deployments that include Windows VMs and Ansible resources within VMware Aria Automation, your connection to those Windows machines for executing Ansible playbooks relies on WinRM HTTPS over port 5986.

If the port 5986 is not listening on the provisioned VM, the deployment fails with the error : 

UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "ssl: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='###.###.###.###', port=5986): Max retries exceeded with url: /wsman (Caused by NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.HTTPSConnection object at 0x############>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 111] Connection refused'))", "unreachable": true}

Environment

Aria Automation 8.x

Resolution

This behavior is primarily managed by Ansible, rather than VMware Aria Automation. Ansible utilizes Port 5986 for secure WinRM connections by default. However, if your specific needs require a different WinRM port, you can explicitly specify ansible_port as 5985 in your Ansible inventory file.

For comprehensive details regarding WinRM configuration within Ansible, including options for customizing ports and security settings, we encourage you to consult the official Ansible documentation.