Avoid forcibly shutting the VM down when there is no shutdown command

[tiramiseb]

Description

Ability to disable the feature that forcibly halts the virtual machine.

Use Case(s)

I have an automatic installer on an ISO image. I just need Packer to boot the VM, type a command, and then wait for the VM to stop by itself.

While it works perfectly with qemu (no forced shutdown), this plugin forces the shutdown.

A workaround I have found is to define shutdown_command = "placeholder" in the source definition (*), but well, it's a bit ugly...

(*): with a fake shutdown command defined but no communicator, it allows (*StepShutdown).Run, to avoid entering in the else block and not forcibly halt the virtual machine.

[tenthirtyam]

I suggest that this is not implemented based on prior precedent for a similar issue on packer-plugin-vsphere. This would deviate from the intended use of Packer and this plugin; however, there is an existing workaround.

Ryan Johnson
Senior Staff Solutions Architect | Product Engineering @ VMware, Inc.

[tiramiseb]

The issue you are linking here is not similar. That issue is about leaving the VM running forever, and manually stopping it afterwards, which is not what I need.

The disable_shutdown option, which is present for packer-plugin-vsphere, would be perfectly fine for my need. A 5-minute timeout (configurable with shutdown_timeout) is more than enough for my installer.

But that option does not exist on packer-plugin-vmware.

[tenthirtyam]

In that case such an option may be an option to consider.