Automating Windows VM creation

What’s the use case?

I need to run some tests against about 10 or so supported windows versions. I can either have these machines built (manually) once via VMWare or something like that and then take snapshots, do my tests and revert to the snapshots. Or I can create automation around spinning up these VM’s and not worry about manually setting up these VM’s ever. The latter approach is the subject of this post. I hope you find it useful.

Tools we’re going to use

The tools we are going to use to acheive this objective are Vagrant, boxcutter and Packer.

Vagrant

Vagrant provides the same, easy workflow regardless of your role as a developer, operator, or designer. It leverages a declarative configuration file which describes all your software requirements, packages, operating system configuration, users, and more. Read more at Vagrant.

Boxcutter

Community-driven templates and tools for creating cloud, virtual machines, containers and metal operating system environments. Read more at boxcutter.

Packer

Packer embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images. Packer brings machine images into the modern age, unlocking untapped potential and opening new opportunities. Read more at Packer.

Let’s dive in and do this

The step by step instructions are as listed below, at the end of which you’ll have a vagrant box ready to use.

git clone https://github.com/boxcutter/windows.git boxcutter-windows
make virtualbox/eval-win2012r2-standard
ls -lh box/virtualbox/eval-win2012r2-standard-nocm-1.0.4.box
vagrant box add box/virtualbox/eval-win2012r2-standard-nocm-1.0.4.box --name win2012r2-standard

What did we just do?

Lets go look at each individual step and understand what we did.

• The git clone step gives you the boxcutter tool and all the required json files to bring up pre-defined windows machines.
• The make step is responsible for downloading the right version of windows based on the kind of box you requested, installing everything you needed and creating a .box file for you to use with your Vagrantfile.
• The ls step shows you that where to find the box packaged per your specifications in the json file.
• The vagrant box add steps is responsible for importing the created .box file into vagrant and enabling vagrant to use that for building future boxes.
• Also create a Vagrantfile with the below contents and you should then be able to do a vagrant up and have your VM ready to use.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
        config.vm.define "eval-win2012r2-standard" do |box|
    box.vm.box = "win2012r2-standard"
          box.vm.guest = :windows
                box.vm.communicator = "winrm"
        end
end