Create a Windows Server 2025 Virtual Machine with Packer
Last week Windows Server 2025 became Generally Available (GA). To create a Windows Server 2025 image I use HashiCorp Packer.
What is Packer?
Packer is free and open-source software. It’s developed and maintained by HashiCorp. You can download it for free and use it without any licensing fees. Packer has the following capabilities:
- Creates Machine Images: Packer builds machine images for various platforms (e.g., VMware, Hyper-V, AWS, Azure) from a single source configuration.
- Configuration-Driven: Packer uses configuration files (typically in HCL format) to define the build process, including the source image, provisioning steps, and output formats.
- Provisioning: Packer supports various provisioning methods to customize the image, such as shell scripts, Ansible playbooks, PowerShell scripts, and more.
- Platform Agnostic: You can use the same configuration to build images for multiple platforms, ensuring consistency.
- Automation: Packer automates the image building process, reducing manual effort and potential errors.
- Version Control: Packer configurations can be version controlled, allowing for reproducible builds and easier collaboration.
- Testing and Validation: You can integrate testing and validation steps into your Packer builds to ensure image quality.
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Packer can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines to automate image building as part of your software delivery process.
In this blog post, I show how to deploy Windows Server 2025 with Desktop Experience enabled running as VM within VMware ESXi 8.
Key Features:
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows Server 2025 (64-bit)
- Hardware:
- vCPUs: 2
- Memory: 4 GB
- Disk: 100 GB (thin provisioned)
- Virtualization-Based Security (VBS): Enabled
- Network Adapter: VMXNET3
- The latest Windows Updates are installed.
- VMware Compatibility: Tested with VMware vSphere 8 (Hardware version 21)
- The VMware PVSCSI (VMware Paravirtual) driver is included in the Windows Server 2025 ISO image, there is no need to select or install the PVSCSI driver from additional media now.
- VMware Tools: Automatically installed (version 12.5.0 with day-zero support for Windows Server 2025)
- Remote Access: OpenSSH (default in Windows Server 2025) used by Packer (instead of using WINRM).
- Package Management: WinGet is fully supported for easy software installation and updates (e.g.,
Winget Upgrade -all
)
Notes:
- Refer to the hardware requirements for Windows Server 2025 for optimal performance: link
- Adjust the variables file in (
win2025-std.auto.pkvars.hcl
) to customize the VM configuration according to your needs. - If Windows Server 2025 (64-bit) is unavailable (depends on the VMware ESXi version) use Microsoft Windows Server 2022 (64-bit) as Guest OS. This can be checked using the following script link
Configuration
- Download the latest Packer binary. link
- Adjust the variables in the
win2025-std.auto.pkvars.hcl
file - Adjust the passwords in the
autounattended.xml
(lines 138 and 177) - Adjust the passwords in locals in the
win2025-std.config.pkr.hcl
. Make sure the SSHUser and SSHPass match the username and password in theautounattended.xml file
. - The KMS keys for Windows Server 2025 can be found here: link
- Adjust the variables and run the commands in the
build.ps1
file
Find the Packer configuration for Windows Server 2025 in my GitHub repo link