Packer deployments to Bare Metal

[Lars Panzerbjørn]

Hi all,

Apologies if this is a silly question, but can Packer deploy images to Bare Metal? Or only virtual environments?

We're currently looking for a solution that can, ideally, do both, and we hoped to use Packer.

If Packer can't be used for physical machines, then so be it...

Many thanks in advance.

-Panzerbjrn

[Luke Farnell]

Packer cannot deploy images to bare metal. Packer only works with cloud providers and hypervisors that give you the ability to snapshot images.

Hope that helps.

Luke

[Lars Panzerbjørn]

Hi Luke,

Thanks for that. It seemed like it from the docs I read, but I couldn't find anything that said it outright...

Cheerio,

Lars

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

depending on how /what you want to standarize

you could:

-   create an installation iso (check kickstart for redhat/centos or preseed for debian/ubuntu)

when this installation happen, you could (but manual work, lots of try/error) use packer with the null provider

however at this point, you can skip packer at all, and just have the iso installation to run the provisioning

so to complement lukes answer, packer doesn't do that, and seems is not needed once you bootstraped the metal machine

Alvro

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Alvaro

[pixel fairy]

oob systems that use vnc, like idrac, should be possible. but you'd have to write your own builder.

[Eric Duncan]

Yes it is possible, but in a round-about way.

Previously I've created VMs that ended up with a disk file of what I wanted to to image. I then converted that disk image to a raw file format, and created an ISO. Lastly I would bootstrap an USB stick with Debian and that ISO file.

Using the included dd command, you would boot off the USB stick and issue the DD command to write the ISO file to your machine.

Searching around, this guy does basically the same thing except he uses Alpine Linux and the ova format and his example writes it to a USB stick. You'd do the same thing, except you'd boot off of a standard Linux Live stick, copy the ISO to it, and tuned the same commands to image your machine.

https://github.com/viralpoetry/packer-bare-metal