A collection of Packer templates used to create VM templates in VMware vSphere.
The goal is to create master/gold image VM templates containing the latest OS updates, while making minimal changes to the installed OS.
Run packer init templates to install the third party Packer Windows Update Provisioner(https://github.com/rgl/packer-plugin-windows-update) plugin. This only needs to be done once.
The Administrator password is reset by Sysprep, but if you'd like to change the password that's used while building the VM templates, update the autounattend.xml files in the answer_files directory. There are two lines that needed to be changed; one sets the password and the other sets the password for use with automatic login.
You'll also need to update the os-admin-password variable in templates/windows-vsphere.json
It's probably more appropriate to update the unattend.xml answer files as those will set the password for cloned VMs.
Copy templates/vsphere.example.json to templates/vsphere.json and update the variables to match your environment.
To build a Window Server 2019 template VM, run packer build -var-file=templates/vsphere.json -var-file=templates/windows-server-2019.json templates/windows-vsphere.json.
To build Window Server 2019 Core template VM, run packer build -var-file=templates/vsphere.json -var-file=templates/windows-server-2019core.json templates/windows-vsphere.json.
Issues (or suggestions and questions) and PRs are welcome!