Packer Plugin for VMware vSphere

The Packer Plugin for VMware vSphere is a multi-component plugin can be used with HashiCorp Packer to create virtual machine images for VMware vSphere®.

The plugin includes three builders and two post-processors which are able to create images, depending on your desired strategy:

Builders

• vsphere-iso - This builder starts from an ISO file and uses the vSphere API to build a virtual machine image on an ESXi host.

• vsphere-clone - This builder clones a virtual machine from an existing template using the uses the vSphere API and then modifies and saves it as a new template.

• vsphere-supervisor - This builder deploys and publishes new virtual machine to a vSphere Supervisor cluster using VM Service.

Post-Processors

• vsphere - This post-processor uploads an artifact to a vSphere endpoint. The artifact must be a VMX, OVA, or OVF file.

• vsphere-template - This post-processor uses an artifact from the vmware-iso builder with an ESXi host or an artifact from the vSphere post-processor. It then marks the virtual machine as a template and moves it to your specified path.

Differences from the Packer Plugin for VMware

While both this plugin and the packer-plugin-vmware are designed to create virtual machine images, there are some key differences:

• Platforms: This plugin is specifically developed to utilize the VMware vSphere API, facilitating the creation of virtual machine images by integrating with VMware vCenter Server and the VMware vSphere Hypervisor. On the other hand, packer-plugin-vmware supports a variety of platforms including VMware vSphere Hypervisor and desktop virtualization products such as VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, and VMware Player, though it does not utilize the vSphere API for its operations.

• Focus: This plugin is purpose-built with a focus on VMware vSphere, offering capabilities such as creating virtual machine images, cloning and modifying base virtual machine images, and exporting artifacts in specified locations and formats. In contrast, packer-plugin-vmware includes builders that operate on both VMware vSphere Hypervisor and the aforementioned desktop virtualization products, providing a different set of functionalities, including support for Vagrant.

Please refer to the documentation for each plugin to understand the specific capabilities and configuration options.

Requirements

• VMware vSphere

  The provider supports versions in accordance with the VMware Product Lifecycle Matrix from General Availability to End of General Support.

  Learn more: VMware Product Lifecycle Matrix

• Go 1.19

  Required if building the plugin.

Installation

Using Pre-built Releases

Automatic Installation

Packer v1.7.0 and later supports the packer init command which enables the automatic installation of Packer plugins. For more information, see the Packer documentation.

To install this plugin, copy and paste this code (HCL2) into your Packer configuration and run packer init.

packer {
  required_version = ">= 1.7.0"
  required_plugins {
    vsphere = {
      version = ">= 1.2.7"
      source  = "github.com/hashicorp/vsphere"
    }
  }
}

Manual Installation

You can download pre-built binary releases of the plugin on GitHub. Once you have downloaded the latest release archive for your target operating system and architecture, extract the release archive to retrieve the plugin binary file for your platform.

To install the downloaded plugin, please follow the Packer documentation on installing a plugin.

Using the Source

If you prefer to build the plugin from sources, clone the GitHub repository locally and run the command go build from the repository root directory. Upon successful compilation, a packer-plugin-vsphere plugin binary file can be found in the root directory.

To install the compiled plugin, please follow the Packer documentation on installing a plugin.

Configuration

For more information on how to configure the plugin, please see the plugin documentation.

• vsphere-iso builder documentation

• vsphere-clone builder documentation

• vsphere-supervisor builder documentation

Contributing

• If you think you've found a bug in the code or you have a question regarding the usage of this software, please reach out to us by opening an issue in this GitHub repository.

• Contributions to this project are welcome: if you want to add a feature or a fix a bug, please do so by opening a pull request in this GitHub repository. In case of feature contribution, we kindly ask you to open an issue to discuss it beforehand.