ESXi playground

This Vagrantfile gives you a little playground to get started with ESXi 6.0.0 and the vSphere Client.

Vagrant boxes

esxi60

The basebox must be build with the packer-esxi repo. Add an ESXi 6.0 box with the name esxi60.

After starting up the Vagrant box have a look at the IP address of the ESXi server.

win7

The basebox must be build with the packer-windows repo. Add a Windows 7 box with the name windows_7.

After starting up the Vagrant box the VMware vSphere Client 6.0.0 will be installed.

Connect with it to your ESXi server to 192.168.254.135 and user root and password vagrant.

Install Vagrant plugin

To provision the ESXi Vagrant box you have to install the Vagrant ESXi plugin:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-esxi

Build the boxes

Just create the two Vagrant boxes with

vagrant up --provider vmware_fusion

Create a Docker machine on the ESXi server

You can create a Docker host with docker-machine on the ESXi server. Use the create-docker-esxi.sh script and adjust the IP address of your ESXi VM.

docker-machine --debug create -d vmwarevsphere \
  --vmwarevsphere-vcenter="192.168.254.133" \
  --vmwarevsphere-username="root" \
  --vmwarevsphere-password="vagrant" \
  --vmwarevsphere-network="VM Network" \
  --vmwarevsphere-datastore="datastore1" \
  --vmwarevsphere-datacenter="ha-datacenter" \
  dockervm0

You will need docker-machine and govc in your PATH. See https://docs.docker.com/machine/ for more details.

Notice: The docker-machine driver does not work with the free ESXi license, but you can try it in the 60 day trial period without inserting the license.

Create a Vagrant box inside the ESXi server

Go into the packer/ubuntu sub directory and build this basebox with packer and your just created ESXi server. This could be done from your host machine, in my case a MacBook Pro.

Just set the IP address as variable so packer can connect to your ESXi server.

cd packer/ubuntu
packer build -var 'remote_host=192.168.254.135' ubuntu1404-desktop-esx.json

This Ubuntu basebox is the work of all the Box-Cutter maintainers and contributors. You can find the original repo at https://github.com/boxcutter/ubuntu.

Run a Vagrant box in ESXi server

Go to the win7 Box and open up a PowerShell console. The vagrant plugin vagrant-esxi is a work in progress. This example is just a proof of concept to show that it is possible to power on VM's in ESXi with Vagrant.

cd c:\vagrant\vagrant
vagrant up