Packer templates for the VMware ESXi bare-metal hypervisor written in legacy JSON

Overview

This repository contains Packer templates for creating VMware ESXi Vagrant boxes written in legacy JSON.

Building the Vagrant boxes with Packer

To build all the boxes, you will need VMware Fusion/VMware Workstation.

First, you'll need to downloadthe ESXi install media from the VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) Download Page.

VMware provides a free license with the following limitations:

• No support
• Free ESXi cannot be added to a vCenter Server
• 2 physical CPUs
• Maximum 8 vCPUs per VM

Promiscuous mode is required for the ESXi virtual machines to the child virtual machines running on it. To disable VMware Fusion prompting for the admin password every time the box is created, run the following command to create the files promiscAuthorized:

sudo touch "/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/promiscAuthorized"

To build ESXi 6.5, use the following:

$ packer build esxi.json

Building the Vagrant boxes with the Makefile

A GNU Make Makefile drives a complete basebox creation pipeline with the following stages:

• build - Create basebox *.box files

The pipeline is driven via the following targets, making it easy for you to include them in your favourite CI tool:

make build   # Build all available box types

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Fabio Rapposelli for providing a great starting point for a ESXi packer template.