VMware

The Packer Plugin for VMware is a plugin that can be used to create virtual machine images for use with VMware desktop hypervisors (VMware Fusion Pro, VMware Workstation Pro, and VMware Workstation Player ¹) and VMware vSphere Hypervisor ².

Installation

To install this plugin, add following to your Packer configuration and run packer init.

packer {
  required_plugins {
    vmware = {
      version = "~> 1"
      source = "github.com/hashicorp/vmware"
    }
  }
}

Alternatively, you can use packer plugins install to manage installation of this plugin.

packer plugins install github.com/hashicorp/vmware

Components

The plugin includes two builders which are able to create images, depending on your desired strategy.

Builders

• vmware-iso - This builder creates a virtual machine, installs an operating system from an ISO, provisions software within the operating system, and then exports the virtual machine as an image. This is best for those who want to start by creating an image.

• vmware-vmx - This builder imports an existing virtual machine (from a.vmx file), runs provisioners on the virtual machine, and then exports the virtual machine as an image. This is best for those who want to start from an existing virtual machine as the source. You can feed the artifact of this builder back into Packer to iterate on an image.

Known Issues

VMware Workstation Player (Linux)

1. You may encounter issues due to dependencies and configuration requirements on VMware Workstation Player for Linux ¹:

   • Dependencies

     • Add qemu-img. This command is available in the qemu package in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, and derivative distributions.
     • Add vmrun. This command is available from VMware Virtual Infrastructure eXtension (VIX) SDK.

   • Configuration

     Edit the file /usr/lib/vmware-vix/vixwrapper-config.txt. The version specified in the fourth column must be changed to match the version in the third column of the output from the vmplayer -v command.

     For detailed steps and troubleshooting, refer to this StackOverflow thread.