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Environment Requirements

  Platform

The project is tested on the following platforms:

Platform Version
VMware vSphere 8.0 or later
VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 3D or later

  Operating Systems

The project is tested on the following operating systems for the Packer host 1 :

Operating System Version Architecture
VMware Photon OS 5.0 x86_64
Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS x86_64
macOS Sonoma Intel or Apple Silicon

  Packer

Component Version Description Resources
   Packer >= 1.11.0 By HashiCorp   
   Packer Plugin for Ansible >= 1.1.1 By HashiCorp   
   Packer Plugin for VMware vSphere >= 1.4.0 By HashiCorp   
   Packer Plugin for Git >= 0.6.2 Community Plugin   

Installation

You can install Packer on VMware Photon OS using the following commands:

export PACKER_VERSION="1.11.0"
export OS_PACKAGES="wget unzip"

tdnf install ${OS_PACKAGES} -y
wget -q https://releases.hashicorp.com/packer/${PACKER_VERSION}/packer_${PACKER_VERSION}_linux_amd64.zip
unzip -o -d /usr/local/bin/ packer_${PACKER_VERSION}_linux_amd64.zip

You can install Packer on Ubuntu using the following commands:.

  1. Configure the repository:

    sudo bash -c 'wget -O- https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | gpg --dearmor > /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg'

  2. Verify the fingerprint:

    gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg --fingerprint

    You can verify that the fingerprint matches the HashiCorp public key published on Security at HashiCorp.

  3. Add the official HashiCorp repository to your system:

    sudo bash -c 'echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] \
https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list'

  4. Install Packer from the HashiCorp repository:

    sudo apt update && sudo apt install packer

You can install Packer on macOS using Homebrew.

brew tap hashicorp/tap
brew install hashicorp/tap/packer

Required plugins are automatically downloaded and initialized when using ./build.sh.

For disconnected sites you may download the plugins and place these same directory as your Packer executable /usr/local/bin or $HOME/.packer.d/plugins.

  Additional Packages

The following additional software packages must be installed on the operating system running Packer.

Package Version Description Resources
   ansible-core >= 2.16 Automation engine for IT infrastructure
   git >= 2.45.0 Version control system for tracking changes
   gomplate >= 3.11.7 Template renderer
   jq >= 1.8.3 Command-line JSON parser
   terraform >= 1.9.5 Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool by HashiCorp
   xorriso >= 1.5.6 ISO filesystem images creator for Linux

Installation

Packages:

tdnf -y install ansible git jq xorriso wget unzip
echo "ansible-core $(ansible --version | grep 'ansible.*core' | awk '{print $3}' | tr -d ']')"
echo "terraform $(terraform version | awk -Fv '{print $2}' | head -n 1)"
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Terraform:

export TERRAFORM_VERSION="1.9.5"
wget -q https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/${TERRAFORM_VERSION}/terraform_${TERRAFORM_VERSION}_linux_amd64.zip
unzip -o -d /usr/local/bin/ terraform_${TERRAFORM_VERSION}_linux_${LINUX_ARCH}.zip

Gomplate

export GOMPLATE_VERSION="3.11.7"
wget -q https://github.com/hairyhenderson/gomplate/releases/download/v${GOMPLATE_VERSION}/gomplate_linux-amd64
chmod +x gomplate_linux-amd64
sudo mv gomplate_linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/gomplate

Packages:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt install -y python3 python3-pip ansible git jq xorriso whois unzip
echo "ansible-core $(ansible --version | grep 'ansible.*core' | awk '{print $3}' | tr -d ']')"
echo "terraform $(terraform version | awk -Fv '{print $2}' | head -n 1)"
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Gomplate:

export GOMPLATE_VERSION="3.11.7"
wget -q https://github.com/hairyhenderson/gomplate/releases/download/v${GOMPLATE_VERSION}/gomplate_linux-amd64
chmod +x gomplate_linux-amd64
sudo mv gomplate_linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/gomplate

Packages

brew install ansible git jq coreutils hashicorp/tap/terraform gomplate
echo "ansible-core $(ansible --version | grep 'ansible.*core' | awk '{print $3}' | tr -d ']')"
echo "terraform $(terraform version | awk -Fv '{print $2}' | head -n 1)"
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

  1. The project may work on other operating systems and versions, but has not been tested by the maintainers. ↩