Ovftool

Scripted Packer build, ovftool export and Vagrant .box file creation

This is the seventh in a series of posts on using a Packer pipeline to generate Vagrant .box files. In the last post we covered using ovftool to convert Packer generated virtual machines into Vagrant .box files. I promised to show you a better way of exporting and creating the Vagrant .box files, so in this post we will be combining the following items in one script: Kicking off the Packer build of a specific template Exporting the Packer generated virtual machine Creating the necessary metadata.

Using ovftool to convert Packer generated virtual machines into Vagrant .box files

This is the sixth in a series of posts on using a Packer pipeline to generate Vagrant .box files. In the last post we covered copying our existing CentOS 6.7 template and adding the Puppet agent in order to generate a new Packer template. In this post we will be covering how to use ovftool to convert Packer generated virtual machines into Vagrant .box files. This post will be going over the manual steps on purpose, since I feel it will make more sense when we start to cover automating the steps that you can already performed by hand.

Setting up Packer, ovftool and Apache web server on a CentOS virtual machine

This is the third in a series of posts on using a Packer pipeline to generate Vagrant .box files. In the last post we setup a ESXi virtual machine that would be the target for creating Packer images. In order to follow along with this post you will need two things: A fresh CentOS virtual machine on which we will install Packer - I’m using CentOS 6.6 minimal install named “packer-centos” with 2 vCPU, 4GB of memory and a 100GB virtual hard drive.