Issues

currently only tested with
- Windows 11
  - Windows 11 Insider Preview
- Windows 10
- should work with locales other than en-us, but untested
...still yet to describe how to use this image (ie. through WinRM and/or OpenSSH) for CI purposes.
we assume if running on Linux, SPICE is available
find a way to disable Windows Defender from the CLI without a reboot
- this does not work as the 'Tamper Protection' needs to be disabled from meat space:
```
powershell.exe -Command "Set-MpPreference -DisableRealTimeMonitoring $true"
```
- ...one interesting approach

Preflight

You will need the following installed:

QEMU (tested with 7.0.0)
- output of qemu-system-x86_64 -accel help must list
  - Linux: kvm
  - macOS (Intel): hvf
- if you wish to use non-accelerated (tcg) mode, Windows will install and run really slowly, but you will also need to uncomment winrm_timeout in setup.pkr.hcl and set it to a multi-hour value
either:
- VNC client
- SPICE client
  - though SPICE provides a nicer user experience, it is a lot of work to get SPICE working under macOS so it is recommended you stick with VNC
curl
GNU make
- macOS users will need to run gmake where make is described instead
m4
unzip

Before starting to build the image, you need to download either a Windows 11 Insider Preview ISO (tested with Dev Channel, tested with build 25227, filename Windows11_InsiderPreview_Client_x64_en-us_25227.iso) or Windows 10 ISO (tested with 22H2, filename Win10_22H2_English_x64.iso) into the top of project directory.

Make sure you have at least 30 GiB of disk space to work with.

Building

Create the image using:

make CORES=2 RAM=4096

Where:

IMAGE (default: first glob match Windows11_*_x64*.iso, Win11_*_x64*.iso and Win10_*.iso in sorted descending order): ISO image to use
- examples are Win11_22H2_EnglishInternational_x64v2.iso, Windows11_InsiderPreview_Client_x64_en-us_25227.iso and Win10_22H2_English_x64.iso
CORES (default: 2, must be more than 1): number of CPUs to provide to the VM
RAM (default: 4096): amount of RAM to provide to the VM in MiB
ACCEL (default: suitable for your OS): QEMU accelerator to use
- Linux: kvm
- macOS: hvf
SPICE (default: on Linux 5930, otherwise 0): port to connect on
- zero (0) forcible disables SPICE

N.B. to see detailed debugging, set the environment variable PACKER_LOG=1

Monitoring the Build

If you wish to use VNC (for example if you are a macOS user) then you should look in the packer console output for:

...
qemu.main: The VM will be run headless, without a GUI. If you want to
qemu.main: view the screen of the VM, connect via VNC without a password to
qemu.main: vnc://127.0.0.1:5909
...

Then point your VNC client at the proto://host:port it lists; the example here shows vnc://127.0.0.1:5909 so you could connect with:

vncviewer 127.0.0.1:5909

Or:

vncviewer :5909

Or:

vncviewer :9

SPICE

For a better and faster experience, you should use SPICE which you can connect with:

make spice SPICE=5930

Where:

SPICE (default: 5930): port to connect on

Usage

Once the image has built (typical build time is 30 minutes), the single output artefact is a qcow2 image located at output-main/packer-main.

To start a VM using this image, run:

make vm CORES=2 RAM=4096 VNC=5900 SSH=2222 SPICE=5930 WINRM=5985 RDP=3389

Points of interest:

you will be presented with the QEMU monitor
you can access the VM either using
- Graphically
  - your VNC viewer (defaults to :0 aka port 5900, or if that is in use increments to the next free port)
  - make spice as before
  - use an RDP (Remote Desktop) client pointing at 3389/tcp
- Terminal connect over localhost (bound to 127.0.0.1) using Administrator/password as your credentials
  - WinRM to 5930/tcp
  - SSH to 2222/tcp
    - if SCP does not work for you, try including the -O parameter to use the legacy SCP protocol which seems to work
we use the image in 'snapshot' mode with means nothing is persisted back to the image
if you wish to persist your changes you should halt (not shutdown) your VM and run from the monitor console
```
commit all
quit
```
image has an snapshot called 'initial' which provides you with a point to restore to using
```
qemu-img snapshot -a initial output-main/packer-main
```

Examples

802.1X

jimdigriz/winci

Related Links