homelab-cloudinit-images

Packer builds to create golden images with open-vm-tools and cloud-init for ESXi. Resulting builds are stored on the ESXi server.

Currently builds Debian 12 and Rocky Linux 9

Each build must be consecutive, with trivial changes you could parallel build (this relating to the network setup).

Requirements

• ESXi (tested on 7U3n)
• Packer
• Ingress rules on the running machine for the kickstart/preseed file
• Open adapter within ESXi to associate the build with

Variables File Example

esxi_host     = "my.exsi.host"
esxi_user     = "myuser"
esxi_password = "mypassword"
datastore     = "mydatastore"
network_name  = "packer"
esxi_insecure = true
disk_size     = 20

Running

• Create variables.pkrvars.hcl in the containing directory with the example above
• Enable TSM-SSH on the ESXi instance and use credentials with permissions for SSH

Run the following:

packer init .
packer validate -var-file=variables.pkrvars.hcl .
packer build -var-file=variables.pkrvars.hcl -parallel-builds=1 .

Running on WSL2

This will not work without a couple modifications. The port from the host machine will need to be bridge from Windows to WSL. This can be achieved with the following commands:

netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenport=8312 listenaddress=0.0.0.0 connectport=8312 connectaddress=<wsl2 addr>
New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "Packer WSL2 Port Bridge" -Direction Inbound -Action Allow -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 8312

The port choice doesn't matter, just ensure it matches with the port configuration below

Add the following variables to variables.pkrvars.hcl

http_host     = "<host ip>" # NOT THE WSL2 IP
http_port_min = 8312
http_port_max = 8312

Run Packer, and it will work as expected.

Using in deployments

The resulting build produces a single disk. If you prefer not re-running the build on every vm, copy the build to elsewhere for storage. The metadata, userdata, and vendordata yml is stored in the vmx config under the following keys:

• guestinfo.metadata
• guestinfo.userdata
• guestinfo.vendordata

The encoding can be gzip+base64, or base64. That information is stored under the following keys:

• guestinfo.metadata.encoding
• guestinfo.userdata.encoding
• guestinfo.vendordata.encoding

Example

If using terraform to manage ESXi resources, see example/ folder for an example terraform setup. It assumes the remote_output_directory (base/) is not changed

metadata.yaml

instance-id: 555
hostname: vm
local-hostname: vm.example.com
cloud_name: vmware
platform: vmware

vendordata.yaml

I don't know, I don't use it. See here for info

userdata.yaml

#cloud-config
manage_etc_hosts: localhost

users:
  - default
  - name: jeff
    sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
    groups: [ sudo, wheel ]
    lock_passwd: true
    shell: /bin/bash
    ssh_authorized_keys:
    - pubkey1
    - pubkey2

runcmd:
  - echo "Hi"

packages:
  - make
  - gcc
  - xorg

Unless you know what you're doing, #cloud-config needs to be on the first line

Further information

See here for the official documentation on the vmware-iso plugin

See here for cloud-init docs

See here for vSphere provider documentation