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

Follow the Packer installation instructions.

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
Packer v1.9.1

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 instructions.

The QEMU/KVM installation instructions are provided below:

$ 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).

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 .

License

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