Release: v2.3.0

[tenthirtyam]

I'm incredibly excited to announce the v2.3.0 release of the Packer Plugin for VMware vSphere.

This release significantly expands the capabilities of the vsphere-clone builder clone sources. It also focuses on improving the reliability, documentation, and overall user and community experience​ of this open source project, which is now Broadcom-originated at github.com/vmware/packer-plugin-vsphere​ after the transfer from HashiCorp earlier this year.

Below are the highlights for the release:

Enhancements

• Expanded vsphere-clone source support:
  • Build directly from vSphere Content Library items, including VM Templates and OVF Templates with content_library_source.
  • Deploy and build from a local OVF/OVA package source with ovf_source.
  • Deploy and build from remote OVF/OVA package source with ovf_source. This includes HTTP, HTTPS, and HTTPS w/ Basic Auth.
  • Refactored and unified OVF/OVA deployment logic across all supported source types, providing a more consistent and extensible foundation for future enhancements.
• Added Data Sources:
  • Added support for data sources, allowing existing vSphere inventory to be queried and referenced directly from HCL configuration patterns for more dynamic and reusable templates. This includes: compute-cluster, content-library, content-library-item, datastore, datastore-cluster, host, network, resource-pool, and virtualmachine.
• Expanded Acceptance Tests
  • Added comprehensive unit tests and acceptance tests coverage and supporting functionality to improve release quality and long-term maintainability.
• Adds a boot_delay hardware setting (0–10000 ms) for both vsphere-iso and vsphere-clone builders.

Documentation

• Introduced comprehensive in-repository documentation at https://vmware.github.io/packer-plugin-vsphere, whilst still supporting external publication to developer.hashicorp.com.
• Reorganized documentation for improved discoverability and long-term maintainability.
• Added release artifact verification documentation explaining how to verify release archive checksums and PGP signatures.
• Refreshed configuration examples.
• Added complete documentation and examples for:
  • Local OVF/OVA sources
  • Remote OVF/OVA sources
  • Content Library sources
  • Data Sources

Chores

• Updated Go and SDK dependencies.
• Updated dependencies.
• Updated GitHub Actions and CI workflows.
• Refactoring to improved the general stability and reliability throughout the plugin based on Go 1.26.

You can view the full changelog at https://github.com/vmware/packer-plugin-vsphere/releases/tag/v2.3.0​.

Ryan Johnson, Maintainer
VMware by Broadcom
GitHub | LinkedIn