MSVSphere Cloud Images

Packer templates and configuration files for building MSVSphere images for various cloud platforms.

Build environment configuration

Supported operating systems:

• MSVSphere 9 and other EL9-compatible distributions
• Fedora

First install Ansible, which we use for virtual machines provisioning:

$ dnf install ansible-core

Then follow the Packer installation instructions. Check the packer-environment.pkr.hcl file for the required Packer version.

Alternatively, you can install a Packer binary from a Yandex mirror: just download a latest version archive and unzip it somewhere in PATH (e.g. ~/.local/bin).

Verify that Packer works:

$ packer version
1.10.0

In order to install required Packer plugins run the following command in the project root:

$ packer init -upgrade .

Dependently on your network configuration, you may also need to open the 8000-9000 TCP port range so that Packer can serve kickstart files to VMs:

$ firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=8000-9000/tcp --permanent
$ firewall-cmd --reload

You will also need to install either QEMU/KVM or VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation, depending on what types of images you are going to build.

For VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation just follow the official site documentation.

The QEMU/KVM installation instructions are provided below:

# for MSVSphere 9
$ dnf install edk2-ovmf libvirt libvirt-daemon-kvm

# for Fedora
$ dnf install @virtualization
$ dnf install edk2-ovmf

Building images

In order to build an image use the following command syntax:

$ packer build -only=${BUILDER}.${CONFIGURATION} .

where ${BUILDER} is a Packer builder (e.g. virtualbox-iso) and ${CONFIGURATION} is an image configuration name (e.g. msvsphere-9-vagrant-x86_64).

On Fedora you might need to provide extra options because it has different paths for qemu-kvm and edk2 firmware:

$ packer build -var qemu_binary=/usr/bin/qemu-kvm \
      -var uefi_ovmf_code=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd \
      -var uefi_ovmf_vars=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_VARS.fd \
      -only=${BUILDER}.${CONFIGURATION} .

A graphical VM console is disabled by default, but you can enable it for debugging purposes by setting the headless variable to false:

$ packer build -only=vmware-iso.msvsphere-9-vagrant-x86_64 \
               -var headless=false .

See the variables.pkr.hcl file for other supported variables.

Building Generic Cloud images

Generic Cloud image build command:

$ packer build -only=qemu.msvsphere-9-gencloud-x86_64 .

Building Vagrant boxes

VirtualBox Vagrant box build command:

$ packer build -only=virtualbox-iso.msvsphere-9-vagrant-x86_64 .

VMWare Vagrant box build command:

$ packer build -only=vmware-iso.msvsphere-9-vagrant-x86_64 .

Debugging image builds

Use PACKER_LOG=1 environment variable definition to get extra debug output from Packer:

$ PACKER_LOG=1 packer build ...

other Packer debugging techniques are described in the Packer documentation.

Add -vvvv flag to the Ansible's extra_arguments block in a Packer config in order to get verbose output from Ansible:

build {
  provisioner "ansible" {
    ...
    extra_arguments = [..., "-vvvv"]
  }
}

Additionally, you can connect to Packer's VNC session using a VNC client. For TigerVNC you will need to enable the following settings:

• Input -> View only (ignore mouse and keyboard)
• Misc -> Shared (don't disconnect other viewers)

By default Packer is running a VNC server on a random TCP port in the 5900:6000 range. But for remote build environments it might be useful to use a specific port so that you can configure a firewall easily:

$ packer build ... -var vnc_bind_address=0.0.0.0 -var vnc_port_min=5900 \
      -var vnc_port_max=5900 .

License

Licensed under the MIT license, see the LICENSE file for details.