[Feature Request] Add VM and Machine Tags to IPs and NICs

[fzumpe]

For an automation purpose it would be quite convinient to add Tags from vphere VMs to IPs attached to them to specify for example DEV- and PROD-Environments, Customers etc.
The Sourcecode explicitly forbits importing tags for other objects than machines, clusters, folders and so on. Is it possible to enlarge configuration options with options like "ip_tag_source = object, vm" etc?

;cluster_tag_source =
;host_tag_source =
;vm_tag_source =

[bb-Ricardo]

Hi,

so far i'm not aware that IP addresses are objects in vmware where we can grab it from.

[fzumpe]

The IPs associated to the VM are already pulled out of the vsphere vcenter alongside with all NICs and other hardware.
While iterating over the dependend objects the tags of the IPs can be set as you do with the tags of the VM.

In module/sources/vmware/connection.py Line 2242 you iterate over the IPs associated to vm nics and add them to the collection of nic_ips which you add to the inventory in 2364.
Additional to the ip/cidr entry, the tag attribute of the VM / Folders / Cluster ... can be added to the variable nic_ips.

[bb-Ricardo]

It sounds like you know how to retrieve the data, I would be quite happy a PR.

[bb-Ricardo]

I might have misunderstood your question.

So you would like to assign the same tags which were retrieved from the vCenter for the Host/VM to the IP and network interfaces? is that correct?

Adding tags should not be that big of a deal but if an IP moves it is quite difficult to remove the old tags from the previous machine as the relation is already lost.

what do you think?

[fzumpe]

Yes, correct. The IP shall receive the tags from its machine. Moving and Reassigning an IP is not a problem because your script does 2 steps: 1. Delete the IP from the old NIC - delete the machine tags from the NBIPaddress object here before orphaning (orphaned-tags will be set anyway) if added by configuration 2. add the IP to the new machine along with the tags.

[bb-Ricardo]

This is unfortunately not easy to realise as it seems. It depends in which order the vCenter lists the VMs.
Also it is not clear which Tags are added manually in NetBox and which Tags are imported from vCenter. Only the vCenter tags should be removed.

What would be your approach?

[bb-Ricardo]

Hey,

just wanted to check if this is still relevant and if so, do you have an approach how to solve the described issue?