Packer Build - vmx to json

[Mark Conway]

I am a newbie to Packer, and have a relatively basic question.  I would like to take an existing VM running on my ESXi host, and create a packer json image file from that existing vmx file.  I have not seen an example of this being done.  Is this possible?  And if so, does anyone have a good video/tutorial for this?

[Rickard von Essen]

You can take an existing image on the ESXi host and use that as a base, but you have to create an image from the VM first (manually), you should use the vmware-vmx builder for this 1). The support for doing this on ESXi is new so you will most likely not find that many examples. But the way it works is similar to ESXi support in the vmware-iso 2) builder.

If you are new to Packer I suggest that you play around with it locally with VirtualBox or VMware Fusion/Workstation/Player etc and use some working examples, you can start with https://github.com/chef/bento.

1) https://packer.io/docs/builders/vmware-vmx.html

2) https://packer.io/docs/builders/vmware-iso.html

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 4:12 PM Mark Conway <mcon...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am a newbie to Packer, and have a relatively basic question.  I would like to take an existing VM running on my ESXi host, and create a packer json image file from that existing vmx file.  I have not seen an example of this being done.  Is this possible?  And if so, does anyone have a good video/tutorial for this?

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