On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 7:50 PM, Michael Vermaes <mvermaes@gmail.com> wrote:

For what it's worth, we had been using Packer to build CentOS Vagrant boxes from the templates provided at https://github.com/chef/bento until recently, as there wasn't an 'official' CentOS box for the VMware provider. Since I am currently working on using Packer's vmware-vmx builder to repackage your new VMware box to include the VMware Tools (the VMware equivalent to the Virtualbox guest additions), I would be interested to know if you would pursue a similar approach (using Packer) for VMware?

That's unlikely. If I understand correctly, Packer always creates a VM using the the targeted virtualization technology, i.e. VMware must be installed on the build machine. I think someone from CentOS already contacted VMware when we thought about also automatically testing the Vagrant images for VMware on cico, but I've not heard anything about a reply yet. Our build system relies on KVM to perform the CentOS installation, and Image Factory to convert the resulting image to different other formats. VirtualBox is a special case: we have difficulties packaging it, but it's free software, licensed under the GPL (Packer uses VNC to connect to the VM and send the necessary keypresses to change the boot parameters, so Oracle's proprietary Extension Pack isn't needed).

As a side note, Vagrant images for proprietary virtualization technologies are always going to be second-class citizens, since we cannot test them automatically, and we cannot use them natively for installation. For VMware it's just a licensing problem, since it is able to run on CentOS, but e.g. Hyper-V or Parallels only run on proprietary operating systems. The best we can do is use Image Factory to convert the KVM images, and hope to find some volunteers to test them before each monthly release.

Best regards,

Laurențiu