Packer building with running machine

[Morgan Andrew Davis]

Hey folks, my name is Morgan Davis. I have been messing around with packer lately as part of my job. My boss is interested in using it to speed up our creation of vm images. As part of that, I was wondering if you can build any kind of image, an ova for instance, from a running/existing vm instead of something like an iso. Any help would be appreciated. 

[Rickard von Essen]

You can build from an existing image with vmware-vmx, virtualbox-ovf, qemu, and parallels-pvm. 

On Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 21:59 Morgan Andrew Davis <morgana...@gmail.com wrote:

Hey folks, my name is Morgan Davis. I have been messing around with packer lately as part of my job. My boss is interested in using it to speed up our creation of vm images. As part of that, I was wondering if you can build any kind of image, an ova for instance, from a running/existing vm instead of something like an iso. Any help would be appreciated. 

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[Morgan Andrew Davis]

Richard

Thank you for that information, I do appreciate it. Do you happen to know if you can use packer to make an image from a running vm? That seems to be what my boss really wants, but I don't think it can be done. From what I can tell it needs to start with something like an iso or ova, it can't start with a running machine.

[Megan Marsh]

If you're hoping to run against machines that are already running, some kind of provisioning tool like ansible or chef is your best bet.

[Rickard von Essen]

Or just use the aws cli - ec2 create-image. 

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/create-image.html

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018, 19:12 Megan Marsh <megan....@gmail.com wrote:

If you're hoping to run against machines that are already running, some kind of provisioning tool like ansible or chef is your best bet.

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