Today I've started to set up my ESXI CentOS hosts. I wanted to automate everything, including the ansible installation, but I figured it's much easier to write up the commands.

Preparation

Unfortunately, Ansible is not a pure CentOS package, but EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). So, first we need to enable those:

yum -y install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
dnf config-manager --set-enabled PowerTools

Note: The above commands need to be executed as root. If you're an administrator, then just prepend sudo to each command.

Installing ansible

Installing ansible then becomes a simple command:

dnf -y install ansible

or using sudo:

sudo dnf -y install ansible

Easy. After that, you can play with remote keys and actually use ansible.

HTH,