HashiCorp Packer for VMware Ubuntu Templates and Terraform for building VMs

Stop using clickops and start automating with Infrastructure as Code concepts. In this video blog post you will learn how to use HashiCorp Packer for VMware to create Ubuntu 18.04 template images in vSphere then use Terraform to deploy these VMs.

Video

Below is a video explanation and demo.

Video Chapters

You can skip to the relevant chapters below:

00:00 – Introduction
01:32 – Packer Ubuntu Explanation
08:28 – vCenter View of Template Created
09:31 – Build the VM using Terraform
16:31 – vCenter View of VMs Created
17:02 – Conclusion

Overview

This video blog post is similar to the one we created for Windows 2019 server images. However, it builds Ubuntu 18.04 images instead.

The two main steps to achieve this are listed below:

First create a Ubuntu 18.04 template and save it in a templates folder in vCenter using Packer.
Then create a VM from this template using Terraform.

Code

Pre-requisites

The following is required to follow along:

Packer (tested on Packer v1.6.6)
Terraform
Access to a vSphere instance (tested on vSphere v6.7)

Setup

Below is our setup diagram.

Troubleshooting Tips

If packer gets stuck on Waiting for IP you may want to check your DHCP server. I’m using a home router and it had too many leases from running packer many times. I had to flush inactive DHCP clients or reboot the router which is faster.
Open the vSphere web console and take a look at the output as the VM is getting created. This can give you some hints as to what is going on.

Conclusion

In this video blog post, we demonstrated two main things:

How to create a Ubuntu 18.04 machine image in VMware using HashiCorp Packer. As you saw, our configuration is all defined in code. There is no need to click around inside the vSphere client to generate this image. We’ve automated the task of building gold machine images in VMware. This makes the process repeatable and self-documented, just a couple of benefits of IaC.
We used Terraform to provision the Ubuntu 18.04 VM by cloning this Packer generated image.

We also created a post on doing the same for a Ubuntu 20.04 image. Then another post to use this image to Build a Kubernetes k3s Cluster in vSphere with Terraform and Packer.