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Packer script for Windows Server 2016 images

This repository contains the Packer script and Vagrant exporter that generate a (virtualbox-based) Windows Server 2016 image ready to be provisioned with Vagrant.

The script has been tested with Packer 1.0.0 and Vagrant 2.0.0.

Requirements

  • Packer
  • Vagrant
  • Virtualbox (as vagrant backend)

Build box

packer build -force -only virtualbox-iso ./win2016.json

Packer will download an evaluation ISO from Microsoft, run an autoattended installation (check out installer/autounattend.xml file) that will install Windows Server Core (no GUI and GUI tools), and then provision Windows Updates and optimizations before bumping a Box.

VM Backend

Currently only Virtualbox is considered. According to the Packer documentation at https://www.packer.io/docs/post-processors/vagrant.html also KVM/qemu, HyperV, VMWare and AWS AMIs are supported.

Publish to Artifactory

In my usecase I needed to publish to our corporate Jfrog Artifactory installation. Other workflows may require Hashicorp Vagrant Cloud for this -- I guess the mechanism is mostly the same.

First retrieve the ${apikey} of a write-enabled user. Then run

curl -H 'X-JFrog-Art-Api: ${apikey}' -T ${box_filename} "https://my.artifactory.address/Vagrant-Repository/${box_name}-${box_provider}-${box_version}.box;box_name=${box_name};box_provider=${box_provider};box_version=${box_version}"

where box_provider, box_version and box_name are tags that will identify the box when Metadata is retrieved (e.g. with Vagrant)

Use the box

To use the box, make reference to the Vagrantfile in vagrant-test/ directory.

In case of Artifactory, you must define a valid ATLAS_TOKEN and VAGRANT_SERVER_URL env variables inside the Vagrantfile, in case your remote repository requires authentication. More infos here: https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/RTF/Vagrant+Repositories

Run

cd vagrant-test
vagrant up

Update the box

The publishing rule on the box repository will create a new box for every version.

However, regardless of what the Vagrant documentation said, I found out that the latest version of the box was not automatically pulled when running vagrant up. So the solution that works for me is

vagrant box update
vagrant box prune
vagrant up

If a version must be forced, use vagrant box update --version=... option.

If someone has a better solution for this, please drop me a message ;)

Kudos

This work is totally inspired by the amazing Matt Wrock. Please check his blog at https://www.hurryupandwait.io and his GitHub repository https://github.com/mwrock/packer-templates. His templates cover the full range of Windowses, and use also configuration management tools during provisioning (namely: Chef and Boxstarter).

The work in this repo is actually just a small bit in comparrison, it only checks out on Windows Server 2016 and uses purely Powershell 5.x scripting.