Announcing the Packer Plugin for VMware vSphere v2.1.0

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

Here are the highlights:

✨ 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

• Fixed CD-ROM device removal so devices are removed in a deterministic order.
• Fixed an issue where hardware configuration wasn't always applied to virtual machines.
• Fixed IPv6 addresses being double-wrapped in brackets in the SSH communicator, which caused connection failures.
• Fixed nested hardware virtualization settings so they only apply when explicitly requested.
• Fixed a compatibility issue in the vsphere-supervisor Jenkins template.
• Refactored firmware type handling so virtual hardware 20 or later with EFI (and EFI with Secure Boot) gets the correct ACPI 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.
• Bumped hashicorp/packer-plugin-sdk to v0.6.5.
• Bumped hashicorp/hcl/v2 from v2.19.1 to v2.24.0.
• Bumped github.com/vmware/govmomi from 0.51.0 to 0.52.0.
• Bumped github.com/ulikunitz/xz from 0.5.10 to 0.5.15.
• Bumped golang.org/x/crypto from 0.40.0 to 0.45.0.

For the full list of commits, see https://github.com/vmware/packer-plugin-vsphere/compare/v2.0.0...v2.1.0