VMware

The Packer Plugin for VMware with which to create virtual machine images for use with VMware products.

Installation

To install this plugin add this code into your Packer configuration and run packer init

packer {
  required_plugins {
    vmware = {
      version = "~> 1"
      source = "github.com/hashicorp/vmware"
    }
  }
}

Alternatively, you can use packer plugins install to manage installation of this plugin.

packer plugins install github.com/hashicorp/vmware

Components

The plugin includes two builders which are able to create images, depending on your desired strategy

Builders

• vmware-iso - Starts from an ISO file, creates a brand new VMware VM, installs an OS, provisions software within the OS, then exports that machine to create an image. This is best for people who want to start from scratch.

• vmware-vmx - This builder imports an existing VMware machine (from a VMX file), runs provisioners on top of that VM, and exports that machine to create an image. This is best if you have an existing VMware VM you want to use as the source. As an additional benefit, you can feed the artifact of this builder back into Packer to iterate on a machine.

VMware Workstation Player on Linux

To use VMware Workstation Player with Packer on Linux, you will also need the qemu-img command, which is available in the qemu package in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, and derivative distributions.

Additionally you will need to have the vmrun command, which is part of the VMware Virtual Infrastructure eXtension (VIX) SDK.

Finally, you must edit the file /usr/lib/vmware-vix/vixwrapper-config.txt and change the version specified in the fourth column to be the version in the third column of the vmplayer -v command. See this StackOverflow thread for more details.