# Curious about how I would leverage my VMWare environment with Waypoint?

**URL:** <https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/curious-about-how-i-would-leverage-my-vmware-environment-with-waypoint/23012>\
**Category:** Waypoint\
**Created:** [April 10, 2021, 8:53am UTC](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/curious-about-how-i-would-leverage-my-vmware-environment-with-waypoint/23012 "2021-04-10T08:53:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![allthingsclowd](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hashicorp/user_avatar/discuss.hashicorp.com/allthingsclowd/32/842_2.png) [@allthingsclowd](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/u/allthingsclowd)\
**Post date:** [April 10, 2021, 8:53am UTC](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/curious-about-how-i-would-leverage-my-vmware-environment-with-waypoint/23012/1 "2021-04-10T08:53:42Z")

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Hello,

Although potentially a legacy infrastructure I know many companies that have significant investments in VMWare.

I run a vCentre Server & ESX test lab and am curious how I would go about integrating these natively with Waypoint.

Is EXEC the option that should be leveraged today until a plugin for VMWare is developed?

I love the new gitOps workflow capabilities and this would help me potentially create a more secure workflow for my Packer builds.

Awesome project - thanks everyone!

Graham

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**Author:** ![jennbriden](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hashicorp/user_avatar/discuss.hashicorp.com/jennbriden/32/12619_2.png) [@jennbriden](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/u/jennbriden)\
**Post date:** [April 24, 2021, 9:37pm UTC](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/curious-about-how-i-would-leverage-my-vmware-environment-with-waypoint/23012/2 "2021-04-24T21:37:23Z")

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Hello!  
When you use the exec plugin, the Waypoint Entrypoint binary is not injected into images, thereby removing the functions of `$waypoint logs` and `$waypoint exec`.

I think that there are two pieces needed here for Waypoint to add in order to support both building VMs with Waypoint (and its workflow) and deploying/releasing to vSphere:

1. A Build plugin to create the VM by using Packer or another tool. The Packer plugin would need to take in the Packer .hcl file for the Packer-specific configuration (e.g., what type of image to build - for example, an AMI or a VMX, etc?).

2. Deploy and Release plugins to deploy and release to vSphere. I don’t know enough about the architecture of vCenter – but I think that someone might have to author multiple plugins and pipe data. Perhaps a hook? This is where I am out of my depth.

@briancain and @nic? What are your thoughts?

Edit - I also want to clarify that the EC2 plugin does not build a VM - it uses the AMI search function in AWS to look up a VM that has already been built. [Plugin: AWS EC2 | Waypoint by HashiCorp (waypointproject.io)](https://www.waypointproject.io/plugins/aws-ec2)

app “vm-test” {  
build {  
use “packer” {  
…  
}  
deploy {  
use “vsphere” ???

}  
}

# …

}

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![allthingsclowd](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hashicorp/user_avatar/discuss.hashicorp.com/allthingsclowd/32/842_2.png) [@allthingsclowd](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/u/allthingsclowd)\
**Post date:** [April 24, 2021, 9:56pm UTC](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/curious-about-how-i-would-leverage-my-vmware-environment-with-waypoint/23012/3 "2021-04-24T21:56:16Z")

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Thank you.

Yes, that would make a lot of sense.  
I have both the packer and tfc components today so plug-ins as you mention would work.

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**Author:** ![briancain](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hashicorp/user_avatar/discuss.hashicorp.com/briancain/32/14082_2.png) [@briancain](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/u/briancain)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2021, 11:41pm UTC](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/curious-about-how-i-would-leverage-my-vmware-environment-with-waypoint/23012/4 "2021-04-29T23:41:01Z")

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> I think that there are two pieces needed here for Waypoint to add in order to support both building VMs with Waypoint (and its workflow) and deploying/releasing to vSphere:

Yep, this makes sense to me. To support VMs, we’d want a build plugin like `packer` for generating vm artifacts, and for shipping that built artifact we’d want something like vsphere for the deploy/release phase.