A collection of Packer templates to standardise, and automate the building of VM templates in vSphere.
A number of things are performed during the image building procedure;
- Disable swap (if applicable)
- Installing common packages
- Kernel parameters defined for ip_forward and bridge-nf-call-iptables
- Run package upgrades
- Sanitise the VM ready for templating
Virtual machines are deployed from these templates via cloud-init for automated IP provisioning and startup scripts. These are defined in vSphere guest customisations.
- Packer is installed where you will be running the build from. Installation instrcutions can be found (https://developer.hashicorp.com/packer/tutorials/docker-get-started/get-started-install-cli#installing-packer)[here].
- Linux and Windows have
VM Guest Customization Specificationdefined in the vSphere policies.
An example vSphere configuration file has been created at config.pkgvars.hcl.example. This file should be copied and updated accordingly to the respective vSphere you would like to provision the template in.
Example for vSphere;
$ cp config.pkgvars.hcl.example config.pkgvars.hcl
$ vim config.pkgvars.hcl # edit the required parameters
Deploying a VM template is simple. An example of creating a new Ubuntu 22.04 template in the LON3 vSphere;
packer init ubuntu-22.04-lts
packer build -var-file=config.pkgvars.hcl ubuntu-22.04-lts
When complete, the build will power down the template and convert it to a vSphere template in the vsphere_template_dir or elsewhere if this has been modified.