My Retina Windows Templates for Packer

Introduction

This repository contains Windows templates that can be used to create boxes for Vagrant using Packer (Website) (Github).

This repo is a modified fork of the popular joefitzgerald/packer-windows repo.

Some of my enhancements are:

Support of fullscreen Retina display on a MacBook Pro.
WinRM, no more OpenSSH
PowerShell attached to taskbar with new features enabled
German keyboard layout and timezone

Packer Version

Packer 0.8.6 or greater is required.

Windows Versions

The following Windows versions are known to work (built with VMware Fusion 7.1.3):

Windows 10
Windows Server 2016 TP4
Windows Server 2016 TP4 with Hyper-V and Docker

You may find other packer template files, but older versions of Windows doesn't work so nice with a Retina display.

Windows Editions

All Windows Server versions are defaulted to the Server Standard edition. You can modify this by editing the Autounattend.xml file, changing the ImageInstall>OSImage>InstallFrom>MetaData>Value element (e.g. to Windows Server 2012 R2 SERVERDATACENTER).

Product Keys

The Autounattend.xml files are configured to work correctly with trial ISOs (which will be downloaded and cached for you the first time you perform a packer build). If you would like to use retail or volume license ISOs, you need to update the UserData>ProductKey element as follows:

Uncomment the <Key>...</Key> element
Insert your product key into the Key element

If you are going to configure your VM as a KMS client, you can use the product keys at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj612867.aspx. These are the default values used in the Key element.

Windows Updates

The scripts in this repo will install all Windows updates – by default – during Windows Setup. This is a very time consuming process, depending on the age of the OS and the quantity of updates released since the last service pack. You might want to do yourself a favor during development and disable this functionality, by commenting out the WITH WINDOWS UPDATES section and uncommenting the WITHOUT WINDOWS UPDATES section in Autounattend.xml:

<!-- WITHOUT WINDOWS UPDATES -->
<SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
    <CommandLine>cmd.exe /c C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -File a:\openssh.ps1 -AutoStart</CommandLine>
    <Description>Install OpenSSH</Description>
    <Order>99</Order>
    <RequiresUserInput>true</RequiresUserInput>
</SynchronousCommand>
<!-- END WITHOUT WINDOWS UPDATES -->
<!-- WITH WINDOWS UPDATES -->
<!--
<SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
    <CommandLine>cmd.exe /c a:\microsoft-updates.bat</CommandLine>
    <Order>98</Order>
    <Description>Enable Microsoft Updates</Description>
</SynchronousCommand>
<SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
    <CommandLine>cmd.exe /c C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -File a:\openssh.ps1</CommandLine>
    <Description>Install OpenSSH</Description>
    <Order>99</Order>
    <RequiresUserInput>true</RequiresUserInput>
</SynchronousCommand>
<SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
    <CommandLine>cmd.exe /c C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -File a:\win-updates.ps1</CommandLine>
    <Description>Install Windows Updates</Description>
    <Order>100</Order>
    <RequiresUserInput>true</RequiresUserInput>
</SynchronousCommand>
-->
<!-- END WITH WINDOWS UPDATES -->

Doing so will give you hours back in your day, which is a good thing.

WinRM

These boxes use WinRM. There is no OpenSSH installed.

Using .box Files With Vagrant

The generated box files include a Vagrantfile template that is suitable for use with Vagrant 1.7.4+, which includes native support for Windows and uses WinRM to communicate with the box.

For Vagrant 1.7.4 you should update some Ruby gems with

vagrant plugin install winrm
vagrant plugin install winrm-fs

Vagrant 1.8+ will have these gems already preinstalled.

Contributing

Pull requests welcomed, but normally should go to Joe's repo.

friism/packer-windows