v0.21.0

Release Date: 2024-09-26

Bug Fix:

• Updates to debian.yml file to remove the disable flag on cloud-init for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS version. #940
• Updates to debian.yml file to fix cloud-init install issue and additional package issue. #944
• Fixes issue when using http data source with a static IP address and the kickstart file could not
  be sent from Packer host. #959

Enhancement:

• Updates pkr.hcl.example and variables.pkr.hcl with defaults. #944, #945

Chore:

• Removes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 from the project. #944

  On 30 June 2024, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 reached the end of life.

• Updates Rocky Linux 8.9 to 8.10 release. #944

• Updates required_versions for packer to >= 1.11.0. #960

• Updates required_plugins for packer-plugin-vsphere to >= 1.4.0. #960

• Updates required_versions for terraform to >= 1.9.5. #960

• Updates required_versions for terraform-provider-vsphere to >= 2.8.3. #960

• Updates required_versions for hashicorp/hcp to >= 0.95.0. #960

• Updates required_versions for packer-plugin-ansible to >= 1.1.1. #960

• Removes Centos Linux 7 from the project. #960

• Updates Debian Linux 12.5 to 12.6 release. #960

• Updates Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to 22.04.1 LTS. #965

• Updates AlmaLinux Build pkr.hcl file change version from 8.9 to 8.10 #965

• Updates Oracle Linux Build pkr.hcl file change version from 8.9 to 8.10 #965

v0.20.0

Release Date: 2024-05-29

Bug Fix:

• Updates Windows Desktop Enterprise Edition to support the default use of evaluation mode. #908

Note

Professional Edition does not support evaluation mode. Microsoft Evaluation Center only provides support for Enterprise Edition. Please see the FAQ for additional details.

Enhancement:

• Adds a download script (./download.sh) and a JSON configuration file (project.json) to assist in the download of the guest operating systems. #874, #877

• Refactored the build script (./build.sh) to provide the same experience as the download script. #910

• Adds Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS to the project. #891

• Adds Fedora Server 40 Linux distribution to the project.

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on Debian 12 .#883

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. #888

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. #888

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on Rocky Linux 9. #895

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on Rocky Linux 8. #895

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on CentOS Stream 8. #897

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on CentOS Stream 9. #897

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on AlmaLinux OS 8. #898

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on AlmaLinux OS 9. #898

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on Oracle Linux 8. #899

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on Oracle Linux 9. #899

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on VMware Photon OS 4. #900

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on VMware Photon OS 5. #900

• Adds option to enable cloud-init on SUSE Enterprise Linux 15. #910

Chore:

• Updates Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 to 9.4 release. #925
• Updates Oracle Linux 9 to 9.4 release. #927
• Updates Almalinux 9 to 9.4 release. #927
• Updates Rocky Linux 9 to 9.4 release. #927
• Removes CentOS Stream 8 from the project.

Note

On 31 May 2024, CentOS Stream 8 reached the end of life.

• Removes Ubuntu Server 23.10 from the project; superseded by 24.04 LTS. #891
• Updates required_plugins for packer-plugin-vsphere to >= 1.3.0.
• Updates required_versions for terraform to >= 1.8.3.
• Updates required_versions for hashicorp/vsphere to >= 2.8.1.
• Updates required_versions for hashicorp/hcp to >= 0.89.0.
• Update ansible-core version from 2.15 to 2.16. #921

Full Changelog:

v0.19.0...v0.20.0

v0.19.1

Release Date: 2024-04-15

Bug Fix:

• Removes the PowerShell provisioner for Windows 11 and 10 as it's not required after the transition to Ansible. #875

Full Changelog:

v0.19.0...v0.19.1

v0.19.0

Release Date: 2024-04-09

Enhancement:

• Adds templates and unit tests for managing custom network and storage configurations for Linux distributions. #473, #805
• Adds additional configuration to install packages for Linux distributions. #800
• Adds option to set a specified number of remaining CD-ROMs for a machine images added in packer-plugin-vsphere v1.2.4. #836
• Adds use of evaluation versions for Windows Server 2025, 2022, and 2019 images, by default. Keys are still supported. #844
• Adds use of evaluation versions for Windows 11 and 10 images, by default. Keys are still supported. #844
• Adds Windows Server 2025 Insiders Preview. #834
• Adds Ansible integration for Windows Server 2025, 2022, and 2019 images. #801
• Adds Ansible integration for Windows 11 and 10 images. #801
• Adds option to enable a content library to source all guest operating system ISOs or use a datastore path. Defaults to false, disabled.
  Set common_iso_content_library_enabled to true to enable use of a content library for all guest operating system ISOs.
• Adds option to enable a content library for the placement of virtual machine images builds. Defaults to true, enabled.
  Set common_content_library_enabled to false to disable use of a content library for saving virtual machine image builds.

Refactor:

• Refactors the Ubuntu builds not to use cloud-init, by default. #843
  Set vm_guest_os_cloudinit to true to enable cloud-init on the machine image.

Chore:

• Updates required_versions for packer to >= 1.10.0.
  #828
• Updates required_plugins for packer-plugin-vsphere to >= 1.2.7. #824, #871, #873
• Updates required_plugins for ethanmdavidson/packer-plugin-git to >= 0.6.2. #868
• Updates required_versions for terraform to >= 1.7.1. #829
• Updates required_versions for hashicorp/vsphere to >= 2.7.0. #866
• Updates required_versions for hashicorp/hcp to >= 0.84.1. #867
• Updates Gomplate to 3.11.7. #825
• Updates Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 to 9.3 release. #819
• Updates Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 to 8.9 release. #818
• Updates AlmaLinux 9 to 9.3 release. #817
• Updates AlmaLinux 8 to 8.9 release. #817
• Updates Rocky Linux 9 to 9.3 release. #823
• Updates Rocky Linux 8 to 8.9 release. #822
• Updates Oracle Linux 9 to 9.3 release. #821
• Updates Oracle Linux 8 to 8.9 release. #820
• Updates Debian 12 to 12.5 release. #865
• Updates Debian 11 to 11.9 release. #864
• Updates Ubuntu 22.04 to 22.04.4 release. #863
• Updates AlmaLinux to upgrade the almalinux-release package during the build.

New Contributors:

• @alcorwalter made their first contribution in #805

Full Changelog:

v0.18.0...v0.19.0

v0.18.0

Note

Release Date: 2023-10-23
Previous Versioning: v23.11

Enhancement:

• Adds VMware Photon OS 5.0 to the project. #582
• Adds Debian 12 to the project. #584
• Adds Oracle Linux 9 to the project. #670
• Adds Oracle Linux 8 to the project. #670
• Adds Windows 11 Enterprise to the project. #688
• Adds Windows 10 Enterprise to the project. #688
• Adds the option to configure the following target for builds: #471
  • a vSphere cluster with Distributed Resource Scheduling enabled. (Default)
  • an ESXi host in vSphere cluster with Distributed Resource Scheduling disabled. (Override)
  • an ESXi host not in a vSphere cluster. (Override)
• Adds a development container for Visual Studio Code. #700
• Adds an example .gitlab.yml file for GitLab CI/CD. #675
• Adds a build-ci.tmpl that can be used to create or update the .gitlab-ci.yml file using gomplate. #675
• Adds Packer logging settings to set-envvars.sh. #705
• Adds a debug option (--debug or -d) to./build.sh to enable debug logging for Packer. #706

Bugfix:

• Updates Debian 11 to include build_password in the linux-debian.pkr.hcl configuration file. #653
• Updates Debian 11 to ensure /dev/sr1 is not mounted with use of the default http data source. No changes to the disk data source. #686

Chore:

• Updates required_versions for packer to >= 1.9.4. #718

• Updates required_plugins for packer-plugin-vsphere to >= 1.2.1. #564

• Updates required_plugins for ethanmdavidson/packer-plugin-git to >= 0.4.3. #717

• Updates required_plugins for rgl/packer-plugin-windows-update to >= 0.14.3. #565

• Updates required_versions for terraform to >= 1.6.0. #757

• Updates required_versions for hashicorp/vsphere to >= 2.5.1. #758

• Updates Gomplate to 3.11.5. #559

• Updates ansible-core to 2.15. #573

• Updates Debian 11 to 11.8 release. #738

• Updates Ubuntu 22.04 to 22.04.3 release. #720

• Updates Ubuntu 20.04 to 20.04.6 release. #566

• Removes Ubuntu 18.04 from the project. #578

  On 31 May 2023, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS reached the end of standard support. See
  Ubuntu Lifecycle for more information.

• Updates Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 to 9.2 release. #576, #587

• Updates Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 to 8.8 release. #577

• Updates Almalinux 9 to 9.2 release. #569

• Updates Almalinux 8 to 8.8 release. #570

• Updates Rocky Linux 9 to 9.2 release. #571

• Updates Rocky Linux 8 to 8.8 release. #572

• Updates CentOS Stream 9 to latest June 2023 release. #567

• Updates CentOS Stream 8 to latest June 2023 release. #568

• Updates SLES 15 to 15.5 release. #740

• Updates Windows Server 2022 to October 2023 (US English) release. #744

• Updates Windows 11 22H2 to October 2023 (US English) release. #743

• Updates Windows 10 22H2 to October 2023 (US English) release. #742

Refactor:

• Removes the use of iso_checksum and iso_checksum_type as they are not needed since the ISOs
  are not being downloaded by the plugin and are expected to be present and already verified by the
  user after download. #722
• Removes the installation of Chocolatey from the Microsoft Windows guest operating system builds. #586

New Contributors:

• @DavidRobson made their first contribution in #771

Full Changelog:

v23.10...v0.18.0

v0.17.0

Note

Release Date: 2023-10-23
Previous Versioning: v23.10

Enhancement:

• Adds support for disabling password expiration for the local administrator account on localized (non-English) Windows guest operating systems. #334.
• Adds support for enabling Remote Desktop on localized (non-English) Windows guest operating systems. #335.
• Adds support to allow SSH authentication with RSA keys for Ansible, if necessary. Adds a note related to OpenSSH >= 9.0 in the documentation. #387.

Bugfix:

• Fixes missing privileges for the custom role in vSphere that effected the ability to build using disk-based deployment modes and Windows 11 22H2 with vTPM. #295, #339, #340
• Updates the URI in user-data.pkrtpl.hcl for Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 to remove the country code. This will help to ensure that GeoIP lookup works for all users. #421
• Updates the install commands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 to use the correct EPEL repository version. #440

Documentation:

• Updates options to download a release or clone the project. #385
• Updates syntax to append RSA algorithm to HostKeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa and PubKeyAcceptedAlgorithms +ssh-rsa. #386
• Updates the ssh-keygen example for generating the ECDSA public key to use a 521 bit key length. Valid key lengths are 256, 384, or 521. #439

Refactor:

• Refactors builds to use the current Git branch / tag as the build_version local variable used for virtual machine image names and descriptions. #385
• Refactors Ansible roles to remove the warn: false args for ansible-core 2.14 compatibility. #443

New Contributors:

• @tintinhamans made their first contribution in #476
• @username-is-already-taken2 made their first contribution in #492
• @roshankathawate made their first contribution in #653
• @necarnot made their first contribution in #686
• @virtualistic made their first contribution in #670

Full Changelog: v0.16.0...v0.17.0

v0.16.0

Note

Release Date: 2023-01-17
Previous Versioning: v23.01

Enhancement:

• Adds support for disabling password expiration for the local administrator account on localized (non-English) Windows guest operating systems. #334.
• Adds support for enabling Remote Desktop on localized (non-English) Windows guest operating systems. #335.
• Adds support to allow SSH authentication with RSA keys for Ansible, if necessary. Adds a note related to OpenSSH >= 9.0 in the documentation. #387.

Bugfix:

• Fixes missing privileges for the custom role in vSphere that effected the ability to build using disk-based deployment modes and Windows 11 22H2 with vTPM. #295, #339, #340
• Updates the URI in user-data.pkrtpl.hcl for Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 to remove the country code. This will help to ensure that GeoIP lookup works for all users. #421
• Updates the install commands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 to use the correct EPEL repository version. #440

Documentation:

• Updates options to download a release or clone the project. #385
• Updates syntax to append RSA algorithm to HostKeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa and PubKeyAcceptedAlgorithms +ssh-rsa. #386
• Updates the ssh-keygen example for generating the ECDSA public key to use a 521 bit key length. Valid key lengths are 256, 384, or 521. #439

Refactor:

• Refactors builds to use the current Git branch / tag as the build_version local variable used for virtual machine image names and descriptions. #385
• Refactors Ansible roles to remove the warn: false args for ansible-core 2.14 compatibility. #443

Chore:

• Updates required_versions for packer to >= 1.8.5. #423
• Updates required_plugins for packer-plugin-vsphere to >= 1.1.1. #416
• Updates required_versions for terraform to >= 1.3.7. #456
• Updates required_versions for hashicorp/hcp to >= 0.51.0. #408, #409, #410, #411, #412, #413, #414, #415
• Updates Gomplate to 3.11.3. #380, #382
• Updates Debian 11 to 11.6 release. #432
• Updates Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 to 9.1 release. #366
• Updates Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 to 8.7 release. #365
• Updates Rocky Linux 9 to 9.1 release. #381
• Updates Rocky Linux 8 to 8.7 release. #368
• Updates Almalinux 9 to 9.1 release. #362
• Updates Almalinux 8 to 8.7 release. #361
• Updates CentOS Stream 9 to latest December 2022 release. #454
• Updates CentOS Stream 8 to latest December 2022 release. #453
• Updates Windows Server 2022 to December 2022 (US English) release. #452
• Updates Windows Server 2019 to November 2022 (US English) release. #373
• Updates Windows 11 22H2 to December 2022 (US English) release.#451
• Updates Windows 10 22H2 to December 2022 (US English) release. #450
• Removes Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (x86_64) and macOS.
• Big Sur (Intel) as tested operating systems for the Packer host. #393

Breaking Change:

• Removes support to use the iso_url variable to download the guest operating system .iso from a URL introduced in #249 due to #343. #435

New Contributors:

• @aseques made their first contribution in #380
• @keys1234249 made their first contribution in #440
• @sophware made their first contribution in #439

Full Changelog:

v0.15.0...v0.16.0

v0.15.0

Note

Release Date: 2022-09-28
Previous Versioning: v22.09

Enhancement:

• Adds support for disk-based deployment mode for Debian 11. #272.
• Adds support for disk-based deployment mode for SLES 15. #276

Bugfix:

• Fixes mismatches in source names for Windows Server when only builds for Standard or Datacenter
  are launched using ./build.sh. #281

Chore:

• Updates Debian 11 to 11.5.0 release. #273
• Updates Ubuntu 22.04 to 22.04.1 release/ #274
• Updates Ubuntu 20.04 to 20.04.5 release. #275
• Updates SLES 15 to 15.4 release.#287
• Updates Windows Server 2022 to September 2022 (US English) release. #282
• Updates Windows 11 to 22H2 September 2022 (US English) release. #284
• Updates Windows 10 to 21H2 September 2022 (US English) release. #283
• Updates required_versions for terraform to >= 1.3.1. #292

New Contributors:

• @ukushisanet made their first contribution in #272
• @joisika made their first contribution in #290

Full Changelog:

v0.14.0...v0.15.0

v0.14.0

Note

Release Date: 2022-08-25
Previous Versioning: v22.08

Enhancement:

• Adds Debian 11. #195
• Adds support for initial configuration and use of the HCP Packer Registry. #236 and #256
• Adds support to use the iso_url variable to download the guest operating system .iso from a URL. #249

Breaking Change:

• Updates vm_cpu_sockets to vm_cpu_count for CPUs. The value of the sockets is determined by dividing the number of CPUs by the number of cores per socket defined. #253

Chore:

• Updates required_versions for packer to >= 1.8.3.
• Updates required_plugins for packer-plugin-vsphere to >= 1.0.8.
• Updates required_versions for terraform to >= 1.2.8.
• Updates Windows Server 2022 to August 2022 (US English) release.
• Updates Windows 11 to August 2022 (US English) release.
• Updates Windows 10 to August 2022 (US English) release.

Full Changelog:

v0.13.0...v0.14.0

v0.13.0

Note

Release Date: 2022-07-26
Previous Versioning: v22.07

Enhancement:

• Adds Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.
• Adds CentOS 9 Stream.
• Adds Rocky Linux 9.
• Adds AlmaLinux OS 9.
• Adds SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15.
• Adds option for setting the number of video displays and the size for the video memory for both Windows 11 and 10, which is useful for virtual desktop use cases (e.g., Horizon). The ability to set the number of displays was added in v1.0.6 of packer-plugin-vsphere.
• Adds a common option to export machine image artifacts (.ovf,.vmdk, and .mf) to an output path.
• Removes the default requirement for a trusted root authority certificate to be imported and
  trusted by each machine image build. This will allow project users to get started more quickly
  without a pre-requisite.

Refactor:

• Refactors builds to use local variables for virtual machine image names and descriptions.
• Refactors builds to use local variables for ISO paths and checksums.
• Refactors builds to use local variables for manifest data and output path.

Chore:

• Updates vSphere to version 7.0.3D or higher to address a known issue with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 with EFI firmware.
• Updates required_plugins for packer-plugin-vsphere to >= 1.0.6.
• Updates required_versions for terraform to >= 1.2.5.
• Updates Rocky Linux 8 to use other4xLinuxGuest64.
• Updates Almalinux 8 to use other4xLinuxGuest64.
• Removes the deprecated CentOS 8 option; end-of-life as of December 31, 2021.
• Removes the deprecated Windows Server 2016 option; end-of-life as of January 11, 2022.

Note

• Supports 15.3 / 15 Service Pack 3.
• HTTP-based deployment only. Disk-based deployment planned.

Full Changelog:

v0.12.0...v0.13.0