My Retina Windows Templates for Packer

Introduction

This repository contains Windows templates that can be used to create boxes for Vagrant using Packer (Website) (Github).

This repo is a modified fork of the popular joefitzgerald/packer-windows repo.

Some of my enhancements are:

Support of fullscreen Retina display on a MacBook Pro.
WinRM, no more OpenSSH
PowerShell attached to taskbar with new features enabled

Packer Version

Packer 0.12.2 or greater is required.

Windows Versions

The following Windows versions are known to work (built with VMware Fusion Pro 8.1.1):

Windows 10
Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V and Docker -> see docker-windows-box for an use case

You may find other packer template files, but older versions of Windows doesn't work so nice with a Retina display.

Windows Editions

All Windows Server versions are defaulted to the Server Standard edition. You can modify this by editing the Autounattend.xml file, changing the ImageInstall>OSImage>InstallFrom>MetaData>Value element (e.g. to Windows Server 2012 R2 SERVERDATACENTER).

Product Keys

The Autounattend.xml files are configured to work correctly with trial ISOs (which will be downloaded and cached for you the first time you perform a packer build). If you would like to use retail or volume license ISOs, you need to update the UserData>ProductKey element as follows:

Uncomment the <Key>...</Key> element
Insert your product key into the Key element

If you are going to configure your VM as a KMS client, you can use the product keys at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj612867.aspx. These are the default values used in the Key element.

Using existing ISOs

If you have already downloaded the ISOs or would like to override them, set these additional variables:

iso_url - path to existing ISO
iso_checksum - md5sum of existing ISO (if different)

packer build -var 'iso_url=./server2016.iso' .\windows_2016.json

Windows Updates

The scripts in this repo will install all Windows updates – by default – during Windows Setup. This is a very time consuming process, depending on the age of the OS and the quantity of updates released since the last service pack. You might want to do yourself a favor during development and disable this functionality, by commenting out the WITH WINDOWS UPDATES section and uncommenting the WITHOUT WINDOWS UPDATES section in Autounattend.xml:

<!-- WITHOUT WINDOWS UPDATES -->
<SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
    <CommandLine>cmd.exe /c C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -File a:\openssh.ps1 -AutoStart</CommandLine>
    <Description>Install OpenSSH</Description>
    <Order>99</Order>
    <RequiresUserInput>true</RequiresUserInput>
</SynchronousCommand>
<!-- END WITHOUT WINDOWS UPDATES -->
<!-- WITH WINDOWS UPDATES -->
<!--
<SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
    <CommandLine>cmd.exe /c a:\microsoft-updates.bat</CommandLine>
    <Order>98</Order>
    <Description>Enable Microsoft Updates</Description>
</SynchronousCommand>
<SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
    <CommandLine>cmd.exe /c C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -File a:\openssh.ps1</CommandLine>
    <Description>Install OpenSSH</Description>
    <Order>99</Order>
    <RequiresUserInput>true</RequiresUserInput>
</SynchronousCommand>
<SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
    <CommandLine>cmd.exe /c C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -File a:\win-updates.ps1</CommandLine>
    <Description>Install Windows Updates</Description>
    <Order>100</Order>
    <RequiresUserInput>true</RequiresUserInput>
</SynchronousCommand>
-->
<!-- END WITH WINDOWS UPDATES -->

Doing so will give you hours back in your day, which is a good thing.

WinRM

These boxes use WinRM. There is no OpenSSH installed.

Hyper-V Support

If you are running Windows 10, then you can also use these packerfiles to build a Hyper-V virtual machine:

This requires @taliesens fork of Packer with Hyper-V support. The linked PR also has binaries available ex: https://dl.bintray.com/taliesins/Packer/Packer.1.0.0.104-HyperV.nupkg

Then run Packer:

packer build -var 'hyperv_switchname=Wifi' .\windows_2016.json

Be sure to set hyperv_switchname to an external Hyper-V switch.

I have the ISO already downloaded to save time, and only have Hyper-V installed on my laptop, so I run:

packer build --only hyperv-iso -var 'hyperv_switchname=Ethernet' -var 'iso_url=./server2016.iso' .\windows_2016_docker.json

You then can use this box with Vagrant to spin up a Hyper-V VM. Vagrant currently needs some patches as well, see the script install-vagrant.ps1 how to patch Vagrant 1.8.4 to fix these issues.

Using .box Files With Vagrant

The generated box files include a Vagrantfile template that is suitable for use with Vagrant 1.7.4+, which includes native support for Windows and uses WinRM to communicate with the box.

Vagrant 1.8.4 does need some workarounds though:

There is a bug in get_vm_status.ps1
winrm-fs needs an update as well See: PatrickLang#1 (comment) These are fixed in 1.8.5, so upgrading is easiest.

Example Steps for Hyper-V:

vagrant box add windows_2016_docker windows_2016_docker_hyperv.box
vagrant init windows_2016_docker
vagrant up --provider hyperv

Contributing

Pull requests welcomed, but normally should go to Joe's repo.

psprowls / packer-windows