Packer: vmware player builds don't work on currently supported versions

Created on 12 Jan 2018  路  7Comments  路  Source: hashicorp/packer

the vmware player builder needs a couple of tools, including vmrun. According to this thread, vmrun was deprecated in version 12. It may be possible to get it running with VIX api libraries.

We should either figure out how to get builds to run with the currently available player, or refuse to run with a useful error message if the wrong version of player is installed.

See:

1102

4503

and reverted commit c5ec92c88bb154bd317aec5b81ba6cf9e4dff9c4

bug buildevmware

Most helpful comment

At least adding a note in the docs saying that it probably doesn't work on recent VMware versions would save people from wasting time trying to troubleshoot like I did.

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curious to hear if anyone's gotten this to work with player >= 12 and vix libraries

I was recently able to kind of getting it working. Here is a draft of my notes:

https://github.com/elatov/elatov.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2018-11-16-use-packer-with-vmware-player-to-build-an-ova.md

Tried to get it working under Windows 7 (no real choice here), didn't worked out.

I'm building centos6 using https://github.com/chef/bento with packer 1.3.0, VMware-player-14.1.3-9474260, VMware-VIX-1.17.0-6661328 and qemu-img 2.3.0.

I had to workaround netmap.conf like @elatov, on Windows the file gotta be created in C:\ProgramData\VMware\netmap.conf. Got another issue with VNC unable to connect, I solved it with a --var="headless=true", this is most likely bento's specific.

I'm stuck at

==> vmware-iso: Step "StepRun" failed, aborting...
Build 'vmware-iso' errored: unexpected EOF

At least adding a note in the docs saying that it probably doesn't work on recent VMware versions would save people from wasting time trying to troubleshoot like I did.

My environment has upgraded to VMware Workstation 15 and I haven't been able to get it working from a Linux host.

My environment has upgraded to VMware Workstation 15 and I haven't been able to get it working from a Linux host.

Hi @cyrus104 is the issue you running into with VMware Player or VMware Workstation 15 on a Linux host? If its Workstation please open a new issue here with the respective logs PACKER_LOG=1 PACKER_LOG_PATH=out.log packer build build.json and a redacted build configuration so we can see what might be going on. I'm currently working with VMware Workstation 15 on Debian so I might be able to help you out.

Hello @nywilken,

I'm on Debian too (Buster) and try to build using vmware-iso, what is your current setup ?
If I installed VMware-Player-15.5.2-15785246.x86_64.bundle, I don't have any vmware or vmrun binary.

I'm unable to install successfully VMware-Player-14.1.7-12989993.x86_64.bundle on my Debian buster (the more recent bundle with a VMware-VIX bundle associated)

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