Contents TL;DR | Overview | Getting started | Usage | Next steps | Contributing | Resources
This repository contains Packer templates for .NET development with Docker, Visual Studio, IIS and and SQL Server on Windows, building virtual machine images and Vagrant boxes for Hyper-V, VirtualBox and AWS.
Contents Operating systems | .NET development | .NET hosting
Note This section covers the details of the published Vagrant boxes this repository builds. See the Getting started section to build your own virtual machine images and Vagrant boxes.
This repository contains Packer templates for the following scenarios:
- Core operating systems for generic experiments with Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 and Docker.
- .NET development using Visual Studio 2017, 2015 and 2010.
- .NET hosting using IIS and SQL Server 2014.
The virtual machine images and Vagrant boxes are built for Hyper-V - supporting nested virtualization -, VirtualBox and AWS and are provisioned using Chef.
See this blog for more background and motivation.
All the components, including the core operating systems, share the following characteristics:
- They are based on their publicly available versions. You might need to provide your own license(s) (for example, a valid Windows or Visual Studio license) to start or keep using them after their evaluation periods expire.
- They are installed using their latest available versions. The latest patches (for example, all the Windows Updates) are applied as well.
- Unless noted otherwise, they are installed using the default configuration options.
The following Vagrant boxes can be used for generic expirments on the respective platforms.
They contain the core operating system with the minimum configuration required to make Vagrant work, and some of the commonly used tools installed and options configured for easier provisioning. All the other Vagrant boxes below are based on these configurations as well.
- Windows 10
- Windows Server 2016
In the box:
-
Windows 10 1703 and Windows Server 2016 1607
- Operating system
- Administrator user with user name
vagrantand passwordvagrantset to never expire - WinRM service enabled
- UAC disabled
- Windows Updates installed and service disabled
- Windows Defender service disabled
- Remote Desktop enabled
- Generalized with Sysprep
- Administrator user with user name
- Tools
- Chocolatey 0.10.5
- 7-Zip 16.4.0
- Chef Client 12.14.77
- Hyper-V Generation 1, Configuration Version 8.0
- Requires Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 version 1607 or later on the host
- VirtualBox VirtualBox Guest Additions 5.1.22
- Recommended to have VirtualBox version 5.1.22 or later on the host
- Vagrant box
- WinRM communicator
- 1 CPU
- 1 GB RAM
- Hyper-V IP address reporting timeout of 5 minutes
- VirtualBox Port forwarding for RDP from 3389 to 33389 with auto correction
- Operating system
-
Docker for Windows Community 17.05 Edge
- Hyper-V Linux and Windows containers
- VirtualBox Only Windows containers
The following Vagrant boxes can be used for setting up virtual workstations for .NET development .
They contain the respective Visual Studio version with the commonly used options and are based on the core operating systems.
- Visual Studio 2017
- Community with Windows Server 2016
- Professional with Windows Server 2016
- Visual Studio 2015
- Community with Windows Server 2016
- Professional with Windows Server 2016
- Visual Studio 2010
- Professional with Windows Server 2016
In the box:
- Visual Studio 2017 Update 2
- C# and F#
- .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.0-4.6
- .NET Core cross-platform development
- .NET desktop development
- ASP.NET and web development
- Data storage and processing
- Azure development
- Visual Studio 2015 Update 3
- C# and F#
- .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.0-4.6
- .NET Core Tools Preview
- Web Developer Tools
- SQL Server Data Tools
- Visual Studio 2010 SP1
- C# and F#
- .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.0
- Web Developer Tools
- SQL Server Data Tools
The following Vagrant boxes can be used for .NET hosting scenarios.
They contain the respective hosting tools with the default configuration are based on the core operating systems.
- IIS 10
- OS component with Windows Server 2016
- SQL Server 2014
- Developer with Windows Server 2016
In the box:
- IIS 10
- .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.0-4.6
- .NET Core Windows Server Hosting bundle
- SQL Server 2014 SP2
- Database Engine
- Management Studio
Note The rest of this document covers the details of building virtual machine images and Vagrant boxes, and assumes that you are familiar with the basics of Packer. If that's not the case, it's recommended that you take a quick look at its getting started guide.
Note Building the Packer templates have been tested on Windows hosts only, but they are supposed to run on any other platform as well, given that the actual virtualization provider (e.g. VirtualBox) supports it. Let me know if you encounter any issues and I'm glad to help.
Follow the steps below to install the required tools:
- Install Packer.
- Install the Chef Development Kit.
- Install the tools for the virtualization provider you want to use.
- Hyper-V Enable Hyper-V.
- VirtualBox Install VirtualBox.
- AWS Install the AWS Command Line Interface and configure a profile.
You are now ready to build a virtual machine image and a Vagrant box.
Note It is recommended to set up caching for Packer, so you can reuse the downloaded resources (e.g. OS ISOs) across different builds. Make sure you have a bunch of fxree disk space for the cache and the build artifacts.
Contents Building a virtual machine image | Building a Vagrant box | Chaining builds further | Testing | Cleaning up
This repository uses some custom wrapper scripts using Cake to generate the Packer templates and the related resources (e.g. the unattended install configuration) required to build the virtual machine images. Besides supporting easier automation, this approach helps with reusing parts of the templates and the related resources, and makes chaining builds and creating new configurations quite easy.
Clone this repo including the submodules, and navigate to the root directory of the clone using PowerShell. Type the following command to list all the available templates you can build:
$ .\ci.ps1 [info]The output will be contain the section packer-info with the list of the templates:
...
========================================
packer-info
========================================
Executing task: packer-info
w10e-virtualbox-base: Info
w10e-virtualbox-sysprep: Info
w10e-hyperv-sysprep: Info
w10e-dc-virtualbox-base: Info
w10e-dc-virtualbox-sysprep: Info
w10e-dc-hyperv-sysprep: Info
w16s-virtualbox-base: Info
w16s-virtualbox-sysprep: Info
w16s-hyperv-sysprep: Info
w16s-amazon-sysprep: Info
w16s-dc-virtualbox-base: Info
w16s-dc-virtualbox-sysprep: Info
w16s-dc-hyperv-sysprep: Info
w16s-iis-virtualbox-base: Info
w16s-iis-virtualbox-sysprep: Info
w16s-iis-hyperv-sysprep: Info
...
You can filter this further to list only the templates for a given virtual machine image type. For example, to list the templates based on the Windows Server 2016 Standard image, invoke the info command with the w16s argument:
$ .\ci.ps1 info w16sNote You can use this filtering with all the ci.ps1 commands below as well. It selects all the templates which contain the specified argument as a substring, so you can filter for components (w10e, w16s, iis, etc.) or providers (virtualbox, hyperv, amazon) easily.
The output will contain only the matching templates:
...
========================================
packer-info
========================================
Executing task: packer-info
w16s-virtualbox-base: Info
w16s-virtualbox-sysprep: Info
w16s-hyperv-sysprep: Info
...
This means that this configuration supports building an image with the native VirtualBox image format (virtualbox-base), and also a box to be used with Vagrant directly with the respective virtualization provider (virtualbox-sysprep, hyperv-sysprep). Under the hood, virtualbox-sysprep will simply reuse the output of virtualbox-base, so the build time can be reduced significantly.
Now, invoke the restore command with the name of the template you want to build to create the resources required by Packer. For example, for the native VirtualBox image format, type the following command:
$ .\ci.ps1 restore w16s-virtualbox-baseThis will create the folder build/w16s/virtualbox-base in the root of your clone with all the files required to invoke the Packer build. This setup is self-contained, so you can adjust the parameters manually in template.json or the other resources and / or even copy it to a different machine and simply invoke packer build template.json there. Most of the time though, you just simply want to build as it is, as the templates are already preconfigured with some reasonable defaults. This can be done of course with the build script as well:
$ .\ci.ps1 build w16s-virtualbox-baseThis will trigger the Packer build process, which usually requires only patience. Depending on the selected configuration, a few minutes or hours later, the build output will be created, in this case in the build/w16s/virtualbox-base/output directory in the root of your clone. Virtual machine images like this can now be directly imported into the respective virtualization provider.
As mentioned above, based on Packer's support for starting builds from some virtualization providers' native image format, builds can reuse the output of a previous build. To build the Vagrant box for the above configuration, type the following command:
$ .\ci.ps1 build w16s-virtualbox-sysprepNote that this will include restoring the build folder with the template and the related resources automatically, and then invoking the build process in a single step. It will also reuse the output of the w16s-virtualbox-base build, so it does not need to do the same steps for a Vagrant box the original build already included (e.g. the core OS installation itself, installing Windows updates, etc.). Once the build completes, the Vagrant box will be available in the build/w16s/virtualbox-sysprep/output folder.
For Hyper-V this build chaining is not supported yet, though of course you can still build a Vagrant box, it's just that it will always start from scratch:
$ .\ci.ps1 build w16s-hyperv-sysprepAs you can expect, for these samples the build artifacts will be created in the builds/w16s folder as well, this time under the hyperv-sysprep/output subfolder. You can use the standard options to distribute them to be consumed in Vagrant.
Similarly to the process above, you can use build chaining to build more complex Vagrant boxes. For example, the configuration for Windows Server 2016 Standard with IIS can be built like this:
$ .\ci.ps1 build w16s-virtualbox-base
$ .\ci.ps1 build w16s-iis-virtualbox-base
$ .\ci.ps1 build w16s-iis-virtualbox-sysprepAs in the previous w16s sample, for this configuration the w16s-iis-virtualbox-base build will start from the output of w16s-virtualbox-base instead of starting with the core OS installation. Chanining builds like this has no limitations, so you can use this approach to build Vagrant boxes with any number of components very effectively.
Note that the script can invoke the build of the dependencies automatically, so for the previous example you can simply type:
$ .\ci.ps1 build w16s-iis-virtualbox-sysprep --recursive=trueThis will in turn invoke the restore and build stages for the w16s-virtualbox-base and w16s-iis-virtualbox-base images as well. By default, restore and build is skipped if the output from a previous build exist. You can force the build to run again using the rebuild command instead, which will clean the build directories first.
For now, for Hyper-V you can simply start from scratch:
$ .\ci.ps1 build w16s-iis-hyperv-sysprepThe build will take somewhat longer, but the result will contain exactly the same components as for the VirtualBox chained builds.
To help testing the build results, the reposiory contains a simple Vagrantfile to create virtual machines using directly the build outputs and the published images.
For example, to test the w16s configuration, from the root of your clone you can type the following command to use the box file in the build\w16s folder:
$ vagrant up w16s-buildThe following command will use the published Vagrant boxes instead by downloading it from Vagrant Cloud:
$ vagrant up w10e-publishYou can use the standard Vagrant commands to clean up the boxes after testing.
Though the build folders are excluded by default from the repository, they can consume significant disk space. You can manually delete the folders, but the build script provides support for this as well:
$ .\ci.ps1 clean w16s-iis-virtualbox-sysprep
Using the filtering, to clean up the artifacts of all the VirtualBox builds, you can type:
$ .\ci.ps1 clean virtualboxOmitting this parameter will apply the command to all the templates, so the following command will clean up everything:
$ .\ci.ps1 cleanTake a look at the repository of virtual workstations to easily automate and share your configurations using the Vagrant boxes.
Any feedback, issues or pull requests are welcome and greatly appreciated. Chek out the milestones for the list of planned releases.
This repository could not exist without the following great tools:
This repository borrows awesome ideas and solutions from the following sources:
React
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Django
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Facebook
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Alibaba
D3
Tencent