Packer is a tool that many IT Infrastructure professions would be familiar with. Packer allows the creation of “machine images” (or base templates) in a way that’s consistent and highly repeatable. The result is machine images that can be used on a variety of platforms such as cloud providers like AWS or Azure or on-prem infrastructure like VMware, all configured to your organisation’s needs.
Nutanix has its own Virtual Machine format called AHV, which runs on Nutanix’s hypervisor Acropolis. Since this hypervisor is based off the KVM hypervisor, and Packer has support for KVM, Packer can be used to build templates for a Nutanix target platform. This post will detail the process I went through to create a Windows 2016 template for Nutanix.