vsphere-iso: Add support for removing ethernet before export

[ghost]

This issue was originally opened by @johnjelinek as hashicorp/packer#10029. It was migrated here as a result of the Packer plugin split. The original body of the issue is below.

---

Description

When I use the normal export capabilities from the vsphere-iso builder without removing the ethernet card, the ovf expects the network capabilities to be available wherever the vmdk is imported. This results in an error like this (using govc in this example).

govc: Host did not have any virtual network defined.

To mitigate this, we've added some manual overrides to the shutdown process before the export occurs, but it feels very hacky:

{
  "builders": [
    {
      "type": "vsphere-iso",
      "disable_shutdown": true
      ,
    }],
  "provisioners": [
    {
      "expect_disconnect": true,
      "inline": [
        "echo '{{user `user`}}' | sudo -S shutdown -h +1"
      ],
      "only": [
        "vsphere-iso"
      ],
      "type": "shell"
    },
    {
      "command": "govc device.remove -k -u '{{ user `user` }}:{{ user `pass` }}@{{ user `host` }}' -vm '{{ user `template` }}' ethernet-0",
      "only": [
        "vsphere-iso"
      ],
      "type": "shell-local"
  }]
}

Another odd nuance is that when using the "disable_shutdown": true, the export from vsphere-iso spits out a vmdk named like template_name-disk-0.vmdk otherwise it's just named disk-0.vmdk, not sure why that is.

Use Case(s)

The primary use-case I see is being able to ship my exported template to vcenters different from the one the template was generated on.

Versions

Packer v1.6.1
govc 0.23.0

[usscarter]

I also just encountered a situation for this that would be an addition.

In my case I actually want to leave the NIC, but I want to swap it over to a different port-group. We have a system that requires the vlan to be set in the template already, and this creates issues.

[jaymzmac]

I would also like to see this feature of removing the network adapter after building the template and prior to uploading to a content library.

[aronwk-aaron]

Original Comment:

Bumping because this is a huge need when making templates

Edit:
This is a necessity when making templates since the template that is created is rarely going to be used on the network that it was built on. So we end up having people taking up our network space and blocking other things from working, which causes a lot of issues with automation. Please consider raising the priority of this issue since it would be a major QoL improvement.

[tenthirtyam]

Hi @aronwk-aaron, et al

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Ryan Johnson
Staff II Solutions Architect | VMware, Inc.