Packer templates for the VMware ESXi bare-metal hypervisor written in legacy JSON

We're moving away from vagrant!

Archived on July 11, 2026.

Boxcutter is moving away from using legacy JSON/vagrant in favour of HCL and producing compressed images that can be loaded into the various hypervisors directly.

Now repos are per-hypervisor with all the OSes within them instead of being per-OS/per-distribution. Currently we're focusing on KVM/QEMU in https://github.com/boxcutter/kvm and we may target other hypervisors in the future.

Renamed the repo from boxcutter/esxi to boxcutter/esxi-json as we may end up reusing the name in the future.

Overview

This repository contains Packer templates for creating VMware ESXi Vagrant boxes written in legacy JSON.

Building the Vagrant boxes with Packer

To build all the boxes, you will need VMware Fusion/VMware Workstation.

First, you'll need to downloadthe ESXi install media from the VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) Download Page.

VMware provides a free license with the following limitations:

• No support
• Free ESXi cannot be added to a vCenter Server
• 2 physical CPUs
• Maximum 8 vCPUs per VM

Promiscuous mode is required for the ESXi virtual machines to the child virtual machines running on it. To disable VMware Fusion prompting for the admin password every time the box is created, run the following command to create the files promiscAuthorized:

sudo touch "/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/promiscAuthorized"

To build ESXi 6.5, use the following:

$ packer build esxi.json

Building the Vagrant boxes with the Makefile

A GNU Make Makefile drives a complete basebox creation pipeline with the following stages:

• build - Create basebox *.box files

The pipeline is driven via the following targets, making it easy for you to include them in your favourite CI tool:

make build   # Build all available box types

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Fabio Rapposelli for providing a great starting point for a ESXi packer template.