Building images in CI/CD

Packer
1

Hello,

I read introduction to this Packer guide and it say:

The majority of the Packer Builders can run in a container or VM, a common model used by most CI/CD services. However, the QEMU builder for KVM and Xen virtual machine images, VirtualBox builder for OVA or OVF virtual machines and VMWare builder for use with VMware products require running on a bare-metal machine.

I would like to be sure that’s still true because I plan to use GitLab and GitLab runners to build images and I want to be sure I need bare-metal machines.

Thanks for your feedback.

1 Like
2

A bare-metal server would be a good platform for building OVA/OVF and similar images. You can definitely use “whatever you want” when building images for AWS or similar cloud providers.

3

Referencing the below documentation change, it appears that bare metal is not required if you have nested virtualization, but it is not perfectly clear to me which builders require either bare metal or nested virt.

Can someone help me clear this up? I want to run packer jobs in a new jenkins instance and I’m trying to decide whether it’s a waste of time to put it in out vsphere cluster. (We’re on esxi 6.7) vs bare metal machine.

I plan to use docker, vmware-iso, virtualbox and vagrant builders.