Dear all,
I am facing the following problem and I wanted help or confirmation, that using Packer vmware-iso is no more possible on ESXi 7.
It seems that in order to get SSH connection to the ESXi host there were some actions to be done on the ESXi host (see Configuring ESXi prerequisites for Packer ā blog.ukotic.net) :
- Activate the SSH service in the ESXi configuration (quite obvious)
- Allow the GuestIPHack
- Complete the firewall settings so to allow Packer to pilot the ESXi server through VNC (vim-cmd).
Unfortunelly it seems that in ESXi 7 :
- security on the services.xml file had been reinforced so it is no more possible to change permissions and edit it, even by passing by the root user. There is a workaround possible but,
- VNC server was removed in ESXi 7 (VMware vSphere 7.0 Release Notes).
So @Hashicorp :
- do you confirm it is no more possible to use Packer vmware-iso with ESXi 7 ?
- if so, it would be interesting to inform this in the Packer documentation.
- if not, how to do ?
- if not, as ovftools were used to export the VM to a OVA file, do you plan packer to use ovftools in place of VNC ?