Announcing the Packer Plugin for VMware vSphere v2.1.0¶

I'm incredibly excited to announce the v2.1.0 release of vmware/packer-plugin-vsphere.

Below are the highlights for the release:

✨ Enhancements

• Added support for datastore clusters (datastore_cluster) for virtual machine builds and post-processing.
• Added datasource (vsphere-virtualmachine)for querying virtual machine information, enabling vsphere-clone to select a template.
• Added an override (bool) option to the vsphere-template post-processor, allowing the overwrite of an existing template if set to true.
• Refactored tools_sync_time to ensure more flexible and accurate time synchronization settings for virtual machines.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Addressed issue removing CD-ROM devices from a virtual machine to ensure a deterministic order of removal.
• Addressed issue where hardware configuration wasn't always applied to virtual machines, ensuring consistent hardware settings.
• Addressed issue where IPv6 address were being double-wrapped in brackets in SSH communicator causing connection failures.
• Addressed issue nested hardware virtualization settings to only apply when explicitly requested, preventing unintended configuration changes.
• Addressed issue in the vsphere-supervisor Jenkins template to address compatibility.
• Refactored support for specifying the firmware type when creating and configuring the virtual machines to ensure that the APCI layout for virtual hardware 20 or later with EFI (and EFI with Secure Boot) have the correct APCI motherboard layout.

🧹 Chores

• Refactored the builder identifier from jetbrains.vsphere to vmware.vsphere to align the identifier with the namespace.
• Bumped Go to 1.24.13.
• Bumpedhashicorp/packer-plugin-sdk to v0.6.5.
• Bumpedhashicorp/hcl/v2 from v2.19.1 to v2.24.0.
• BumpedBumpedgithub.com/vmware/govmomi from 0.51.0 to 0.52.0.
• Bumpedgithub.com/ulikunitz/xz from 0.5.10 to 0.5.15.
• Bumpedgolang.org/x/crypto from 0.40.0 to 0.45.0.

For list of all commits, please refer to the following: https://github.com/vmware/packer-plugin-vsphere/compare/v2.0.0...v2.1.0