In a nutshell, the Packer vsphere-template post processor is clearing the UUID while the Terraform vsphere provider expects it to be populated.
I am researching the possibility of using Packer in conjunction with Terraform to automate infrastructure build-out on VMware ESXi 6.5. Everything was working as expected until the Terraform vsphere provider went 1.0. When this happened, the provider changed the way it was looking up templates within vsphere. Initially it does a lookup by name, then all subsequent lookups are done by the UUID returned from the first lookup. This is where the template that I created with Packer comes into the picture. When the vsphere-template post processor is used to unregister, register, and mark the VM image created as a template it clears out the UUID. Because of this, I cannot use a Packer-created vsphere template with Terraform. As a test, I decided to forego the vsphere-template post processor so I could go into the vsphere web client and convert the VM to a template from there. When I did, the UUID of the VM was retained and Terraform was able to use the template as expected. I am doing a little digging into both the Packer and vmware projects on Github to see if I can find out what commands are being used to perform these operations but this is still a work in progress. In the meantime, I thought I would float my situation by this group to see if anyone else is familiar with this issue. -- This mailing list is governed under the HashiCorp Community Guidelines - https://www.hashicorp.com/community-guidelines.html. Behavior in violation of those guidelines may result in your removal from this mailing list. GitHub Issues: https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/issues IRC: #packer-tool on Freenode --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Packer" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to packer-tool+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/packer-tool/b956d25c-8c75-48e0-89b3-a046800c0522%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
