Chef - Packer and generating images from custom ISO

If you want to develop quicker, you cant sit around waiting for your operations team to give you a server. .. and then give you another server when you destroyed it 20 minutes later. That's where you download VirtualBox, get Packer, Vagrant and go nuts.

The point of this post is to talk about packer templates you can get from GitHub. (templates have been moved into another project, but you can still get all of them for basic packer consumption from a dev branch of the same repo. Or just roll back master branch a couple of commits):

https://github.com/misheska/basebox-packer

If you want to use a ISO other than the one in a template, you'll need to specify a couple of parameters for packer, and get the SHA1 of the ISO you're using.

If you have OpenSSL, SHA1 is super easy: 

openssl sha1 c:\Images\raw\7601.17514.101119-1850_x64fre_server_eva
l_en-us-GRMSXEVAL_EN_DVD.iso

Alternatively, you can get this tool from the mothership:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11533

Command:

packer build -only=virtualbox-iso -var 'iso_url=C:\Images\raw\7601.17514.101119-1850_x64fre_server_eval_en-us-GRMSXEVAL_EN_DVD.iso' -var 'iso_checksum=beed231a34e90e1dd9a04b3afabec31d62ce3889' win2008r2-enterprise.json

That's it. 5 minutes later you will have a brand spanking new virtual box for continuous destruction.

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/ The best way to learn Chef is to use \
\ Chef. --Me                           /
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/ Actually, my goal is to have a sandwich \
\ named after me.                         /
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        :o o:   O   
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       |     |
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