Tutorial: Building a Windows Server 2019 VMware Template with HashiCorp Packer

Lately I have been fully immersed in the world of Automation and Infrastructure as Code! Specifically Ansible and a few of the HashiCorp products including Packer and Terraform.

This tutorial walks you through completely automating the process of building a VMware Template of Windows Server 2019. This tutorial leverages Packer and is ideal for a completely hands-off approach of creating repeatable templates to deploy off of. For example, the image is able to be further customized and deployed with Terraform. This tutorial will deploy a Windows Server 2019 Standard Edition Server with an Evaluation License key.

The tutorial builds the VMware Template. To take this tutorial to the next step, users may utilize Terraform to fully provision and deploy the virtual machine(s) into the environment. When deploying VMs using Terraform you will use the VMware Terraform provider. The provider offers the ability to specify Linux or Windows VM customizations which include setting the OS hostname and adding the server to the domain.

The full tutorial is available on my GitHub Packer Repository. The end result is a fully provisioned VMware Virtual Machine Template which would be able to be deployed.