packer-zcore

Packer build for the zCore Appliance — a Debian-based OVA that provides the shared infrastructure services for a zPod environment.

• OS: Debian 13.5 "Trixie"
• Format: OVF/OVA (built on a remote ESXi host via vmware-iso)
• First-boot config: driven by VMware OVF properties

Services

The appliance bundles the core services a zPod relies on:

Service	Role
dnsmasq	DNS resolver + DHCP for the zPod management subnet
chrony	NTP server (serves time to all zPod subnets / VLANs)
NFS	nfs-kernel-server — exports /FILER/STORAGE01/* from a data disk
Traefik	TLS reverse proxy for the dashboard and zBoxAPI
zBoxAPI	API to manage zPod VLANs (/zboxapi)
FRR	Routing daemon (installed, disabled — enabled on demand)

IP forwarding is enabled, so the appliance also routes between the zPod VLANs.

Networking

• eth0 — management interface (static from OVF properties, or DHCP fallback)
• eth1 — zPod VLAN trunk (MTU 1700 for VXLAN/Geneve):
  • internal non-routed VLANs 10 / 20 / 30 → 172.16.10/20/30.1/24
  • routed /26 public subnets on VLANs 64 / 128 / 192

Building

Requirements: packer, VMware ovftool, and a reachable ESXi build host.

1. Copy zcore-builder.json.sample to zcore-builder.json and fill in your ESXi build host details. (The real zcore-builder.json is .gitignored so credentials are never committed.)

2. Run the build:

   ./build-zcore.sh

This runs packer build against zcore.json with the zcore-13.5.json version file, then exports the OVA. The result lands in output-zcore-13.5/zcore-13.5.ova (mode 644).

Deploying

This should only be used through zPodFactory.