New to Packer

[Kevin Gregory]

Hi Folks,

I am the administrator of our virtual environment running VMware ESXI 6. One of our departments is looking to leverage packer to build our RHEL templates, and  they are looking to use vsphere builder.  We have tried to use domain accts to no avail and I set up local accounts to no avail.  We are getting a connection to the ESXI HOST as I am seeing a connection being made within the HOSTD.log file. 

user=vpxuser:VSPHERE.LOCAL\PackerTest] Task Created : haTask--vim.SessionManager.acquireGenericServiceTicket-2135324
2019-01-14T17:58:54.849Z info hostd[76950B70] [Originator@6876 sub=Vimsvc.TaskManager opID=6580cec5-bd62-4c92-ac2a-63437f3fa18f-179845-ngc-14-5d-86b4 user=vpxuser:VSPHERE.LOCAL\PackerTest] Task Completed :

Beyond this nothing is created.

Below is the generic .JSON file that our application folks are utilizing.

"type": "vsphere-iso",              

      "vcenter_server": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",

      "insecure_connection": "true",

      "username": packe...@vsphere.local,

      "password": "",

      "cluster": "cluster",

      "host": "ESXHOST1",

      "datacenter": "USE1",

      "vm_name": "RHEL7PackerTest",

      "convert_to_template": "false",

      "folder": "Templates",

      "cpu": "1",

      "ram": "2048",

      "network": "admin",

      "network_adapter": "VMXNET3",

      "guest_os_type": "rhel7_64Guest",

      "datastore": "TEMPLATES",

      "disk_size": "20-GB",

      "iso_datastore":"TEMPLATES",

      "iso":"rhel-server-7.6-x86_64-dvd.iso"

Our Applications team wants us to enable SSH on the ESXI Hosts, but I see it is not recommended, Also we are being asked to run the following command. 

esxcli system settings advanced set -o /Net/GuestIPHack -i 1

This allows Packer to infer the guest IP from ESXi, without the VM needing to report it itself.

Since both groups are new to this process of using packer, I wanted to check here for the best practice.

Thank you in advance.

KG

[Rickard von Essen]

The vsphere-iso builder is a 3pp plugin 1) that I don't know much about except that it has a good reputation and there is some slow work to get it into the official repository, see PR #7168 2). But I wouldn't hold my breath for that, it might take some time before it is in.

I have some experience with the vmware-iso builder on ESXi. It has some incompatibilities with vSphere, vMotion and distributed switches if I remember correctly. If you have problem with that I recommend that you run a standalone ESXi just for building with Packer, the same thing is if you are concerned about the security implications of GuestIPHack and allowing SSH to the ESXi's. This you can either run on HW or under nested virtualisation in a vSphere VM.

1) https://github.com/jetbrains-infra/packer-builder-vsphere

2) https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/pull/7168

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