Packer

The last months I built a lot of environments for tests with IBM Connections Componentpack, Rancher, plain Kubernetes, IBM Domino and some more. In former years, I deployed single virtual machines, cloned them and created snapshots to “easily” jump back in cases of errors. Then I found Packer , which helped me to automate the first virtual machines on my local notebook.

Now I use Packer to create templates for VMware vSphere, which then are deployed and multiplied with Terraform . Terraform needs some packages installed in the template, that it can provision virtual machines on vSphere.