Packer

Deploying vSphere Templates with Packer &amp Azure DevOps

Ever since starting out on my learning journey with Packer and writing my ‘Getting Started’ blog series, I have not stopped learning and developing my templates. I have also learnt a lot from other members of the tech community, such as @mpoore, as well as discovering this repository - vmware-samples. I really wish I had found this sooner than I did, as its a great resource! It was especially useful to me for Linux examples. That said, its been great taking my own learning journey.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 | 14 minutes Read

Getting Started With Packer to Create vSphere Templates – Part 5 – Bringing it Together!

Here we are, Part 5! If you have stuck with me through this series, thank you for taking the time. If not, you can catchup with Parts 1-4 by searching my blog! I wanted to end this series with something different to just text, code and images. So I am going to show you the end to end template deployment process with video’s using user defined variables but with a few environment variables in the Linux example.

Tuesday, August 3, 2021 | 2 minutes Read

Getting Started With Packer to Create vSphere Templates – Part 4 – Blocks

Welcome to Part 4 of the Packer Series! In this part we will look at putting together all the block and files we need to deploy a template! As we have touched upon in earlier parts, we have multiple blocks and files available to us that can be used to make up a complete configuration. We will walk through a complete Source and Build Block here using user defined variables to complete the build. In the final part of this series, I will use a combination of user and environment variables to give you an idea of how you may use this outside of a lab.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Getting Started With Packer to Create vSphere Templates – Part 3 – Variables

Welcome back to part 3 of my Creating vSphere Templates using Packer series, if you missed part 1 or 2, you can find them here and here. In part 3 we will explore variables! Why would we use variables? Variables allow you to specify customisations to your templating code without having to edit your actual build files. This can be useful when you are reusing code for multiple templates. There are multiple types of variables that can be used, but we will talk about 2 types of input variables in this blog. They are what I will refer to as; User defined variables and Environment variables. We will talk about both during the blog post and the use cases for each.

Tuesday, July 6, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Getting Started With Packer to Create vSphere Templates – Part 2 - Answer Files and Scripts

Welcome to part 2 of my Getting Started with Packer series, if you missed part 1, you can find it here. In part 2, we will take a look through an important part of creating your vSphere templates; Answer Files and scripts. Firstly, we will be looking at a couple of example scripts that can be used to configure your operating system before its turned into your template. We will then move on to answer files that allow an automated, non user prompting installation of your operating system. These answer files provide configuration details during the operating system installation.

Tuesday, June 22, 2021 | 8 minutes Read

Getting Started With Packer to Create vSphere Templates - Part 1

Virtual Machines Templates, why? Templates are a great way to achieve consistent, repeatable and fast virtual machine (VM) deployments, be it an on-premise vSphere environment or cloud based environment. Having up to date VM templates for each of the operating systems you use, is key to being able to deploy infrastructure quickly and easily across multiple platforms. In this series of blog posts, I will be focusing on deploying virtual machine templates in vSphere, specifically vSphere 7, using a product called Packer by HashiCorp. Packer is an Infrastructure as Code tool specifically for template management.

Tuesday, June 15, 2021 | 6 minutes Read