Add support for VMware Cloud Director (VCD) builder

[bogi0704]

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Description

I would very much like to use packer in our VMware Cloud Director (VCD) environment natively. I am aware that there is a vSphere-iso builder, but that is, imho, just a workaround and does not help tenants without access to the vSphere backend at all.

Use Case(s)

A VCD Packer builder would enable us to move heavily towards immutable infrastructure on our VCD environment. We already have years of experience doing that on public clouds like azure or gcp.

References

There are multiple references here and there and many people have tried to create a Packer builder in the past. See #1824 and #3280 for example. These are already pretty old and relied on a deprecated library. The new library would be vmware/go-vcloud-director, which is also used for the VCD Terraform provider and maintained by the same devs.
There has also been another try by a dev, but that did not go anywhere, since he did not manage to find a publicly available instance to test against. He was also stuck on this issue regarding the go-vcloud-director library.

Let's see if this leads to anywhere :)

[ChiefGhostZero0x1]

👍

[LordImperious]

I fully support, I really lack support for the vCD in the packer

[nywilken]

Thanks for opening up this request. Given the Packer team's current priorities we wont be able to work on this any time soon. But we do prioritize pull-request reviews if a member of the community is open to contributing a builder for VCD.

Pinging @tenthirtyam for thoughts on the request.

[tenthirtyam]

Sounds like a good idea - also, some good community reactions 👍 so far. (Assuming each are VCD users.)

Happy raise the concept with some of our internal product teams next chance we meet. The other option is for a community working group to organize and develop a seperate plugin.

Ryan Johnson
Distinguished Engineer, VMware by Broadcom

[arogarth]

Would be nice 👍

[quentinlegay]

that would be great! I am also waiting for it

[butler54]

Just to add a comment w.r.t scope and some investigation. Console access would be very difficult to implement form what i've seen due to the use of a custom VMWare protocol.

support for a vcd-clone operation.

[ChiefGhostZero0x1]

Add support for a vcd-clone operation

Configure console access

[tenthirtyam]

Community Reminder

1. Please vote on this issue by adding a 👍 reaction to the original issue to help the community and maintainers prioritize this request
2. Please do not leave "+1", 👍, or other comments that do not add relevant new information or questions, they generate extra noise for issue followers and do not help prioritize the request.
3. If you are interested in working on this issue or have submitted a pull request, please leave a comment

[majosula]

Hello, Is there any progress, workaround?

[sva-mk]

Hey @tenthirtyam, a VMware Cloud Director integration for Packer would greatly benefit our workflow. Is there anything we can do to assist in the development of this feature?

[tenthirtyam]

No plans at this time; however, base on the collection 👍 reactions I'll provider this over to our (VMware) product management for consideration.

[sva-mk]

Thank you for your consideration! We're excited to see if Packer integration with VMware Cloud Director becomes a possibility. If any additional information or support is needed from our end, please don't hesitate to reach out. We'll look forward to any updates or progress on this request.

[ibeerens]

Here is an extra vote for Packer integration with VMware Cloud Director. Regards, Ivo Beerens

…

On Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 2:18 PM Merlin Kling ***@***.***> wrote: Thank you for your consideration! We're excited to see if Packer integration with VMware Cloud Director becomes a possibility. If any additional information or support is needed from our end, please don't hesitate to reach out. We'll look forward to any updates or progress on this request. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#86 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AB77FXK7FFIRU7GAN7SP5UTX3LNJPANCNFSM56E6QXVA> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[rasperepodvipodvert]

👍

[rgryder]

Would also like to voice my support for this. I have spent some time attempting to deconstruct the protocol used for the Cloud Director console, as that is the primary blocker in my view; managed to get programmatic access of sorts by hosting a modified version of the default console application, but that is a bodge at best. The minified Javascript SDK is an absolute nightmare to weed through.

I think this is going to require an olive branch from VMware for information on how the (very obscure and poorly documented) console protocol works at the very least, or preferably adding support for programmatic console access directly through vCD without relying on a browser-based client application, which severely limits flexibility.

[aliaksandr-dabrytski-epam]

I would also like to vote for this enhancement.

Regards,
Alex D.

[tenthirtyam]

Community Note

• Please vote on this issue by adding a 👍 reaction to the original issue to help the community and maintainers prioritize this request
• Please do not leave "+1" or other comments that do not add relevant new information or questions, they generate extra noise for issue followers and do not help prioritize the request
• If you are interested in working on this issue or have submitted a pull request, please leave a comment

[eduardbulai]

This would be of great help!

[tenthirtyam]

Hello! 👋

I wanted to update this community that this request has been redirect to product management in the VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom for consideration. Since this plugin is targeted for use with VMware desktop hypervisors, Workstation and Fusion, this needs to be considered for a seperate plugin based on product directions.

Please provide your upvotes and comments on request VCF-I-1741.

Ryan Johnson
Distinguished Engineer, VMware by Broadcom