24 October, 2017

Create Windows image using Packer and Ansible and then run it in Vagrant (libvirt)

I saw many Packer templates which are used to build the Windows images on Github. Almost all of them are using PowerShell scripts or DOS-style batch files. Ansible can use WinRM to manage Windows for some time - therefore I decided to use it also with Packer when building the images. Because of the bug it was not possible to use Ansible 2.3 (or older) with Packer + WinRM.

The latest Ansible 2.4 is working fine with Packer + Qemu + WinRM when you want to create the Windows images: https://www.packer.io/docs/provisioners/ansible.html#winrm-communicator