Packer, Vagrant and Windows

Fun day of setting up Packer with configurations my colleague put together :)
Packer is a way for you to build a Vagrant box locally with all the software and configurations you need, without having to transfer an enormous VBox around. Very neato.
On running a simple "packer build ", your OS should build from scratch. First problem I encounter:
More info here
The executable 'bsdtar' Vagrant is trying to run was not
found in the %PATH% variable. This is an error. Please verify
this software is installed and on the path.

What do you expect I'd do? I locate bsdtar.exe in "C:\HashiCorp\Vagrant\embedded\mingw\bin", and add the path to my PATH. Then I get another error:

The box failed to unpackage properly. Please verify that the box
file you're trying to add is not corrupted and try again. The
output from attempting to unpackage (if any):

x Vagrantfile
x box.ovf
x metadata.json
x ubuntu1404-disk1.vmdk: Write failed
Packer/bsdtar.EXE: Error exit delayed from previous errors.

Well that was useless. Long story short, it seems like a bug when upgrading Vagrant from an older version to a newer version. I upgraded from 1.6.3 to 1.6.5. Uninstalled my current and reinstalling Vagrant 1.6.5 fixed the issue.

Getting past the intial setup, we wrote scripts to automate installation of a particular IBM product: Maximo. Here's some of the dependencies:

• Install WebSphere Application Server or Oracle WebLogic, ~2-3GB
• A database (I used Oracle 11g R2), minimalistically this takes about 5-10GB space
• Yum packages (e.g. Ant, Oracle DB pre-reqs)
• Open File descriptors, kernel property changes
• Running maxinst.sh

Installing Weblogic and Oracle DB doesn't actually taking a long time. Maxinst takes the bulk of the time, and has a tendency to fail. A couple of key notes I took for Packer:

• The documentation suggests using a post processor to keep "intermediary artfacts" (the vbox) like so:
  

  
    "post-processors": [
      {
        "output": "builds/centos65-wwm-base.box",
        "type": "vagrant",
        "keep_input_artifact": true
      }
    ]
  

  
  The trouble is, I still get "Deleting output directory" at the end of a failed build, which means "keep_input_artifact" only works if your build succeeds (I'm guessing, I never tried). Horrible stuff, you're going to automatically delete 3 hours worth of builds with no way for me to keep my vbox? Not happy HashiCorp.
• I like to lock my screen while stuff runs in the background. With Packer? Bad idea.