Network Interface not enabling when provisioning VM from Ansible - networking

Question

I'm provisioning VM from ansible-playbook using VMware template, I can see the VM is created successfully but the network interface is not enabled automatically. I have to manually go to the VMware console and then edit the settings of the VM to enable the Network Interface. Kindly check the below playbook tasks and suggest what correction I need to do to enable the Network Interface when running the playbook
tasks:
- name: Create VM from template
vmware_guest:
validate_certs: False
hostname: "{{ vcenter_hostname }}"
username: "{{ username }}"
password: "{{ password }}"
esxi_hostname: "{{ esxhost }}"
datacenter: "{{ datacenter_name }}"
name: "{{ name }}"
folder: TEST
template: "{{ vmtemplate }}"
disk:
- size_gb: "{{ disk_size | default(32) }}"
type: thin
datastore: "{{ datastore }}"
networks:
- name: VM Network
ip: 172.17.254.223
netmask: 255.255.255.0
gateway: 172.17.254.1
device_type: vmxnet3
state: present
wait_for_ip_address: True
hardware:
memory_mb: "{{ vm_memory | default(2000) }}"
state: present
register: newvm
- name: Changing network adapter
vmware_guest_network:
hostname: "{{ vcenter_hostname }}"
username: "{{ username }}"
password: "{{ password }}"
datacenter: "{{ datacenter_name }}"
name: "{{ name }}"
validate_certs: no
networks:
- name: "VM Network"
device_type: vmxnet3
state: present

Answer 1

According to the documentation you can "connect" the network interface via connected: true. There is also a parameter start_connected. So add both to your networks dictionary
networks:
- name: VM Network
ip: 172.17.254.223
netmask: 255.255.255.0
gateway: 172.17.254.1
device_type: vmxnet3
connected: true
start_connected: true
I can't see a default value in the documentation, but I assume - they are per default false.
Also - there is no state parameter in networks dict list.

Answer 2

I have had this issue before. This happen because you're using VDS and on the vm-template side the open-vm-tools is installed instead of vmware-tools.
I was able to fix this issue by applying this workaround:
First install vmware-tools in the template instead of open-vm-tools.
Make sure in the playbook that the VM got those parameters:
connected: true /
start_connected: true
In case there is a need for open-vm-tools after, you can simply run a small playbook which uninstall vmware-tools and reinstall the open-vmtools instead.