[CentOS-devel] Status report: packaging VirtualBox Guest Additions

On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 3:37 AM, Laurențiu Păncescu <lpancescu at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 7:50 PM, Michael Vermaes <mvermaes at 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
>
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>
>
​OK. That's disappointing, but I understand the limitations a bit better
now. Thanks for explaining the background.​ And please let me know if/how I
can help with the Fusion monthly testing.

Michael
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