High-Level Steps

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Infrastructure:

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1. A Virtual Machine with a Managed Identity
   1. Created the VM, an Public IP, an NSG/ASG to allow RDP
2. A Resource Group for that Virtual Machine
3. A Resource Group that Packer can use to create VMs
4. A Resource Group where the Managed Images or VHD files are stored
5. (opt) A storage account to store the vhd files

Packer Configuration

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1. Connect to VM (RDP)
2. Install Choco

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

1. Choco Install Packer choco install packer
2. (opt) Install vscode choco install vscode
3. mkdir C:\Packer
4. verify packer is installed packer -v
5. Create configuration file, windows-desktop.pkr.hcl

packer {
  required_plugins {
    azure = {
      version = ">= 1.3.0"
      source  = "github.com/hashicorp/azure"
    }
  }
}

1. Packer commands:

packer init [config-file.pkr.hcl]
packer fmt .
packer validate [config-file.pkr.hcl]
packer build [config-file.pkr.hcl]

Additional Notes

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Be mindful of slashes in scripts. Packer recommends using forward-slash ‘/’ characters instead of backslashes ‘' in paths. This works for the most part but it caused one part of my configuration to fail when I was passing a path to a file as an input variable. Where necessary you can use double backslashes, where the first is an escape character.