brokebastard / packer-alpine

Packer build for Alpine Linux (Tiny vSphere VMware Appliance)

Alpine Linux appliance

Based on Alpine Linux which is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.

Purpose

Very small VM for migration labs/quick networking tests Configures itself from OVF Properties, so can be automated easily with govc/ovftool.

VM Hardware Configuration:

• 1 CPU
• 512 MB RAM
• 8 GB Hard Disk

Download

Built artifact from Packer (Only 48MB !!!)

• https://cloud.tsugliani.fr/ova/alpine-3.15.4.ova

OVF Properties

Here is the available properties

• guestinfo.hostname: "mysmallvm"
• guestinfo.ipaddress "192.168.0.11"
• guestinfo.netprefix "24"
• guestinfo.gateway "192.168.0.1"
• guestinfo.dns "1.1.1.1"
• guestinfo.domain "zpod.io"
• guestinfo.password "VMware1!" (default password)
• guestinfo.sshkey "ssh-rsa AAAA...[concatened].... tsugliani@zpod"

You can leverage ovftool or govc to automate deployments with the properties. I usually prefer govc for this as the properties can be managed as a JSON field and this goes pretty well with Python automation.

Have fun !

❯ govc import.spec alpine-3.15.4.ova
{
  "DiskProvisioning": "flat",
  "IPAllocationPolicy": "dhcpPolicy",
  "IPProtocol": "IPv4",
  "PropertyMapping": [
    {
      "Key": "guestinfo.hostname",
      "Value": ""
    },
    {
      "Key": "guestinfo.ipaddress",
      "Value": ""
    },
    {
      "Key": "guestinfo.netprefix",
      "Value": ""
    },
    {
      "Key": "guestinfo.gateway",
      "Value": ""
    },
    {
      "Key": "guestinfo.dns",
      "Value": ""
    },
    {
      "Key": "guestinfo.domain",
      "Value": ""
    },
    {
      "Key": "guestinfo.password",
      "Value": ""
    },
    {
      "Key": "guestinfo.sshkey",
      "Value": ""
    }
  ],
  "NetworkMapping": [
    {
      "Name": "VM Network",
      "Network": ""
    }
  ],
  "MarkAsTemplate": false,
  "PowerOn": false,
  "InjectOvfEnv": false,
  "WaitForIP": false,
  "Name": null
}