The fruits of my labour can be found in the repo packer-windoze, I’m still tweaking it as I go along but the current iteration probably won’t change dramatically anytime soon.
#PACKER BOOTS MANUAL#
The image must be created without any manual steps, and the resulting image can be started by Vagrant and ready to use without any manual intervention.Works with Server 2008 all the way to Server 2016.Can be run by anybody that has access to a host with Ansible and VirtualBox installed.In the end I decided to do the work myself and create a way to generate the images I required but to fit the following requirements
#PACKER BOOTS CODE#
Unfortunately I had a few issues with his implementation as it did not support OS’ older than 2012 R2 and there was a lot of duplication of code and configuration which made it hard to follow how it works. There were some existing repo’s online I could use and just fork to cover what I required, the closest I could find was Matt Wrock’s packer-templates Github repo and his excellent blog post here. I could either find an existing set of images online and reuse those or I could automate the entire process from start to finish myself and just run that script every few months or so. In the end what I decided that manually maintaining images would be too time consuming and I decided to find another solution.
#PACKER BOOTS UPDATE#
I could have solved this by just creating a new set of images or trying to update the existing ones, but this was not a fun process so I kept on putting it off.