Packer Plugin for VMware Desktop Hypervisors

The Packer Plugin for VMware Desktop Hypervisors is a plugin for creating virtual machine images for use with VMware desktop hypervisors, VMware Fusion Pro and VMware Workstation Pro.

The plugin includes two builders for creating virtual machine images, depending on your desired strategy:

• vmware-iso - This builder creates a virtual machine, installs an operating system from an ISO, provisions software within the operating system, and then exports the virtual machine as an image. This is best for those who want to start by creating an image.

• vmware-vmx - This builder imports an existing virtual machine (from a.vmx file), runs provisioners on the virtual machine, and then exports the virtual machine as an image. This is best for those who want to start from an existing virtual machine as the source. You can feed the artifact of this builder back into Packer to iterate on an image.

Supported Hypervisors

This plugin supports the following desktop hypervisors.

• VMware Fusion Pro 13 (13.6.0 and later) for macOS
• VMware Workstation Pro 17 (17.6.0 and later) for Linux and Windows

Tip

Refer to the product documentation of the supported desktop hypervisors for system requirements.

Tip

To use the export functionality of the plugin, you must install VMware OVF Tool 4.6.0 or later.

Important

The plugin no longer supports VMware ESX as of version v2.0.0.

For VMware ESX support, please use the Packer plugin for VMware vSphere.

Requirements

Go:

• Go 1.24.11

  Required if building the plugin.

Usage

For examples on how to use this plugin with Packer refer to the example directory of the repository.

Installation

Using Pre-built Releases

Automatic Installation

Packer v1.7.0 and later supports the packer init command which enables the automatic installation of Packer plugins. For more information, see the Packer documentation.

To install this plugin, copy and paste this code (HCL2) into your Packer configuration and run packer init.

packer {
  required_version = ">= 1.7.0"
  required_plugins {
    vmware = {
      version = ">= 1.2.0"
      source  = "github.com/vmware/vmware"
    }
  }
}

Manual Installation

You can download the plugin from the GitHub releases. Once you have downloaded the latest release archive for your target operating system and architecture, extract the release archive to retrieve the plugin binary file for your platform.

To install the downloaded plugin, please follow the Packer documentation on installing a plugin.

Using the Source

If you prefer to build the plugin from sources, clone the GitHub repository locally and run the command go build from the repository root directory. Upon successful compilation, a packer-plugin-vmware plugin binary file can be found in the root directory.

To install the compiled plugin, please follow the Packer documentation on installing a plugin.

Documentation

For more information on how to use the plugin, please refer to the documentation.

• vmware-iso builder documentation
• vmware-vmx builder documentation

Contributing

The Packer Plugin for VMware Desktop Hypervisors is the work of many contributors and the project team appreciates your help!

If you discover a bug or would like to suggest an enhancement, submit an issue.

If you would like to submit a pull request, please read the contribution guidelines to get started. In case of enhancement or feature contribution, we kindly ask you to open an issue to discuss it beforehand.

Support

The Packer Plugin for VMware Desktop Hypervisors is supported by the maintainers and the plugin community.

License

© Broadcom. All Rights Reserved. The term "Broadcom" refers to Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

The Packer Plugin for VMware Desktop Hypervisors is available under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0 license.