Advice on immutable VMware Virtual Machine build

[sp]

Hi,

I'm new to packer and looking any advice how to start with immutable vm build.

[Gabo Kete]

HI 

Packer is ment to be used for Managing Images, VMs, AMI, etc.. If you want to truly explore Immutable Platform Builds. My advise is you look into Terraform in combination with Packer.. 

Regards

[pulipate sekhar]

Thanks 

Is that possible to build manually for testing?

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Thanks & Regards,

Sekhar.P

[dragon788]

Terraform is more of a deployment tool.

You can use Packer to build VMs for desktop virtualization tools like Virtualbox or VMware Workstation or server virtualization like XenServer or VMware vSphere or cloud systems like AWS EC2 or Azure VMs.

Within Packer you would use a configuration management tool like Saltstack or Chef or Ansible or Puppet (or Powershell DSC if you have existing configurations for Windows).

One of the benefits of using Packer is to have repeatable and testable builds, but you can build a base image for VMware Player/Workstation and then use the VM protection tools to make an encrypted/protected VM that won't allow modifications of the base image but instead only saves snapshots with the changes and you can set a policy to have it revert back to the base image when shut down.

[pulipate sekhar]

Thanks

I have minimum background knowledge of VMware.

Will you let me know what VMware tool I need to use?

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[dragon788]

You can build targeting VMware Desktop (Workstation or Fusion) or VMware Server (vSphere or ESXi). To build for desktop you'll need VMware Workstation and to use the box with Vagrant you'll need the Vagrant VMware plugin. To build for vSphere you'll need an ESXi box with or without vSphere management.