packer-examples-for-vsphere VS bento

VMware have samples here https://github.com/vmware-samples/packer-examples-for-vsphere

I also want to add that I modeled my config out of this: https://github.com/vmware-samples/packer-examples-for-vsphere/tree/main

Yeah I think I understand that bit. The only thing I didn't really understand was this example. Everything is defined in that one hcl file including compute resources.

Could anyone help show what I could do for a deployment using https://github.com/vmware-samples/packer-examples-for-vsphere that gets WinRM disabled and a sysprep implemented before the template is created? This just isn't clicking.

Packer to build regular templates, VMware has an example repo of this: https://github.com/vmware-samples/packer-examples-for-vsphere

The github page has packer templates that you can modify to make your own custom boxes.

- https://github.com/chef/bento/tree/main/packer_templates/windows

I've previously used Hashicorp Packer configs in a private git repo (based on the 'chef bento' configs used for many standard Vagrant boxes) that can build template server images for and then deploy a complete fully unattended CI pipeline from scratch, using nothing more than Apache Subversion (built into CentOS and RHEL but also has an excellent Windows version!) and Jenkins. Takes under 15 mins to provision both and can be tested locally (and completely offline!) in Virtualbox as it uses a limited amount of resources. I developed the solution for a rather risk averse client that required a cheap and easy reusable centrally managed CI pipeline that could handle larger sources than git by default and be built from artefacts on a private 'air-gapped and sheep-dipped' LAN with verified SHA256 hashes for all vendor binaries. Source: https://github.com/chef/bento