Where do you build your vmware boxes ?

[rgarrigue]

Hello

I'm packaging boxes via Packer and chef/bento based configuration files. VirtualBox is all fine, but I hit a wall trying to run my vmware CentOS / RHEL boxes over ESXi using vagrant + vagrant plugin vagrant-vmware-esxi : disk seems to be ignored, the VM boot is looping on PXE/TFTP lookup.

So I'm trying to understand hence this question. I tried some upstream boxes : centos/6 and centos/7 does work, generic/centos6 centos7 rhel7 doesn't, same symptoms. CentOS is building his boxes over a VMWare Workstation. Mine are built over ESXi 5.1 5.5. Where/how do you build yours ?

And any hints for investigation would be welcomed, I've been at it for days, I'm out of idea!

[ladar]

I build and test the boxes using VMWare Workstation on Linux. I haven't tested them using ESXi. If you discover the problem, please let me know, so I can fix it.

I've noticed a difference in reliability between using the official VMWare tools and installing the Open VM tools. It's possible the boxes aren't working because of the latter. While it doesn't sound directly related, I've also had problems with vagrant detecting the DHCP IP address when the workstation GUI isn't running (on GUI build bots). Checkout this ticket: hashicorp/vagrant#9902

Do the working boxes have the official VM tools, or unofficial ones? Is there anything special in the bundled Vagrantfiles?

[ladar]

@rgarrigue can you confirm that you're using the vmware_desktop version of the box for the centos/7 version? Old versions of centos/7 are available as "vmware" , "vmware_workstation" and "vmware_fusion". Is it possible you are downloading an old box?

[ladar]

@rgarrigue didn't reply, so closing.