Playing with Packer Packer is some seriously magic stuff. It was the first HashiCorp product I ever used and continues to be one of my favorites. Recently, Packer got a version bump to 1.5 which included more than a few nice features. One of the bigger features was the inclusion of the JetBrains vSphere builder which I’ve covered a few times previously. This builder makes it wicked easy to build images on vSphere, and removes some of the more frustrating requirements around the previous version. Read more

Building Templates Manually is Boring AF Quite a while back I did a post around leveraging HashiCorp’s Packer product to build vSphere Templates. There was a couple gaps that existed coming out of that post… I was wicked new to Packer and had much to learn The Packer post-provisioner was immature when it came to vSphere Template conversion, meaning, it couldn’t do it at the time Refresher on Packer What is Packer? Read more

This weekend I discovered Packer from HashiCorp. And My World Was Changed…Just Way After Everyone Else I had decided to add a few more catalog items to vRealize Automation and realized that I didn’t have any Ubuntu templates loaded in my environment. I figured I would load up a couple builds - specifically 16.04 and 17.04. I hopped on Google and started looking for best practices around configuring a Ubuntu template and stumbled upon articles discussing automating template builds with something called Packer. Read more