packer-rocky8-esxi

What is packer-rocky8-esxi ?

packer-rocky8-esxi is a set of configuration files used to build an automated Rocky Linux 8 virtual machine images using Packer. This Packer configuration file allows you to build images for VMware ESXi.

Prerequisites

• Packer
  • https://www.packer.io/intro/getting-started/install.html
• ESXi
  • VMware ESXi
  • With SSH enabled.
• Plugins
  • Vagrant-vmware-esxi plugin
• Vagrant
  • Vagrant Cloud account
  • VAGRANT_CLOUD_TOKEN environment variable with your Vagrant Cloud authentication token.

How to use Packer

Commands to create an automated VM image:

To create a Rocky Linux 8 VM image using VMware Workstation use the following commands:

export VAGRANT_CLOUD_TOKEN="<insert token here>"
packer build -var 'version=<version>' -var 'boxname=<boxname>' -var 'esxi_password=<password>' rocky8.json

By default the .iso of Rocky Linux 8 is pulled from https://nlrtm1-edge1.cdn.i3d.net/o1/k9999/pub/rockylinux/8.5/isos/x86_64/Rocky-8.5-x86_64-boot.iso

You can change the URL to one closer to your build server. To do so change the "iso_url" parameter in the "variables" section of the rocky8.json file.

{
  "variables": {
      "iso_url": "https://nlrtm1-edge1.cdn.i3d.net/o1/k9999/pub/rockylinux/8.5/isos/x86_64/Rocky-8.5-x86_64-boot.iso"
}

Keyboard configuration

By default the keyboard is set to be US qwerty. To switch it to something else edit the following file:

• ./http/ks.cfg

Set the keyboard parameter as desired, for example: keyboard --vckeymap=fr --xlayouts='fr'

Ansible Role

These configuration files use a Ansible Role : ansible-role-packer_rhel8

Default credentials

The default credentials for this VM image are:

Username	Password
packer	packer
root	packer
vagrant	vagrant