packer-plugin-vcd

Packer Plugin for VMware Cloud Director

The Packer Plugin for VMware Cloud Director is a plugin that can be used to create virtual machine images on VMware Cloud Director (VCD).

The plugin includes one builder:

• vcd-iso - This builder creates a virtual machine, uploads an ISO to a VCD catalog, installs an operating system using boot commands, provisions software within the operating system, and then exports the virtual machine as a vApp template. This is best for those who want to create images from scratch using ISO files.

Features

• ISO-based VM creation - Upload ISOs to VCD catalogs and create VMs from scratch
• Boot command support - Send keystrokes to VM console via WebMKS protocol for automated OS installation
• HTTP server - Serve kickstart/preseed files during installation
• SSH/WinRM communicator - Connect to VMs for provisioning (Linux and Windows)
• Export to catalog - Export finished VMs as vApp templates

Requirements

• Packer >= 1.10.0
• VMware Cloud Director 10.4+ (API version 38.0+)

[!NOTE] The plugin has been tested with VMware Cloud Director 10.6.

Usage

For examples on how to use this plugin with Packer refer to the example directory of the repository.

Installation

Using Pre-built Releases

Automatic Installation

Packer v1.7.0 and later supports the packer init command which enables the automatic installation of Packer plugins. For more information, see the Packer documentation.

To install this plugin, copy and paste this code (HCL2) into your Packer configuration and run packer init.

packer {
  required_version = ">= 1.7.0"
  required_plugins {
    vcd = {
      version = ">= 0.0.1"
      source  = "github.com/juanfont/vcd"
    }
  }
}

Manual Installation

You can download the plugin from the GitHub releases. Once you have downloaded the latest release archive for your target operating system and architecture, extract the release archive to retrieve the plugin binary file for your platform.

To install the downloaded plugin, please follow the Packer documentation on installing a plugin.

From Source

If you prefer to build the plugin from sources, clone the GitHub repository locally and run the command go build from the repository root directory. Upon successful compilation, a packer-plugin-vcd plugin binary file can be found in the root directory.

git clone https://github.com/juanfont/packer-plugin-vcd.git
cd packer-plugin-vcd
go build

To install the compiled plugin, please follow the Packer documentation on installing a plugin.

Configuration

For more information on how to configure the plugin, please see the plugin documentation.

• vcd-iso builder documentation

Network Considerations

For ISO-based builds with preseed/kickstart, the VM needs network connectivity to fetch the preseed file from the Packer HTTP server during OS installation.

• DHCP networks: The installer will automatically obtain an IP address.
• Static IP networks: If your VCD network uses IP pools without DHCP, you must provide static network configuration via boot command parameters using the vm_ip configuration option.

Contributing

If you discover a bug or would like to suggest a feature or an enhancement, please use the GitHub issues.

Related Projects

• docker-machine-driver-vcd - Docker Machine driver for VCD
• fleeting-plugin-vcd - GitLab fleeting plugin for VCD

License

BSD-3-Clause