Tutorial: Automatic, Reproducible Preparation of Virtual Machine templates for your vSphere environment with HashiCorp's Packer

Sun, 14 Jan 2018 10:45:52 +0000

Introduction

Let us say that you are using an vSphere (VMWare vCenter + one or more ESXi servers) environment in your company and you are creating virtual machines pretty often. Obviously you are familiar with the virtual machines template functionality but where could you get the templates? Well, one of the options is to look for them somewhere on the internet but that is not a very reliable thing to do since you have to trust a third-party to provide these to you. Most, if not all, operating systems distributors do not provide a VMWare template for their operating system. For example, Canonical only provides Ubuntu in a form of an ISO file. Thus, you have to change your approach and make the templates yourself. However, doing that manually that is tedious and very menial so you will look for solutions to this problem. Packer is something that solves this problem.

Packer on Giedrius Statkevičius

Tutorial: Automatic, Reproducible Preparation of Virtual Machine templates for your vSphere environment with HashiCorp's Packer

Introduction