Packer and Ansible testing with Hyper-V (on Windows 10)

Why?

With almost all of our clients now preferring AWS and Azure for hosting VMs / Docker containers we have to manage a lot of AMIs / VM images. Ensuring that these AMIs are correctly configured, hardened and patched is a critical requirement. To do this time and cost effectively, we use packer and ansible. There are solutions such as Amazon’s ECS that extend the boundary of the opaque cloud all the way to the containers, which has a number of benefits but does not currently meet a number of non-functional requirements for most of our clients. If those non-functional requirements we gone, or met by something like AWS ECS, it would be hard to argue against simply using terraform and ecs – removing our responsibility for managing the docker host VMs.

Anyway, we are making some updates to our IaaS code base which includes a number of new requirements and code changes to our packer and ansible code. To make these changes correctly and quickly I need a build/test cycle that is as short as possible (shorted than spinning up a new EC2 instance). Fortunately, one of the benefits of packer is the ‘cloud agnosticism’… so theoretically I should be able to test 99% of my new packer and ansible code on my windows 10 laptop using packer’s Hyper-V Builder.

Setting up

I am running Windows 10 Pro on a Dell XPS 15 9560. VirtualBox is the most common go-to option for local vm testing but thats not an option if you are already running Hyper-V (which I am). So to get things started we need to:

1. Have a git solution for windows – I am using Microsoft’s VS Code (which is really a great opensource tool from M$)
2. Install packer for windows, ensuring the executable is in the Windows PATH
3. Create VM in Hyper-V to act as a base template (I am using Centos 7 minimal as we use https://www.centos.org/download/CentOs AMIs on AWS)
4. Install Hyper-V Linux Integration Services on the Centos 7 base VM (this is required for Packer to be able to determine new VMs’ IP addresses) – if you are stuck with packer failing to connect with SSH to the VM and you are using a Hyper-V switch this will most likely be the issue
5. Add a Hyper-V builder to our packer.json (as below)

...
  {
    "clone_from_vm_name": "sonet-ami-template",
    "shutdown_command": "echo 'packer' | sudo -S shutdown -P now",
    "headless": true,
    "ssh_password": "{{user `ssh_username`}}",
    "ssh_username": "{{user `ssh_username`}}",
    "switch_name": "Default Switch",
    "type": "hyperv-vmcx"
  }
...

Now, assuming the packer and ansible code is in a funcitonal state, I can build a new VM and run packer + ansible via powershell (run with administrative privileges) with:

packer build --only hyperv-vmcx packer.json