Add support for serial ports

Community Note

Please vote on this issue by adding a 👍 reaction to the original issue to help the community and maintainers prioritize this request. Please do not leave "+1" or "me too" comments, they generate extra noise for issue followers and do not help prioritize the request. If you are interested in working on this issue or have submitted a pull request, please leave a comment.

Description

The current version of the plugin lacks support for configuring serial ports. This feature would enable users to add and configure serial ports during the provisioning process.

Use Case(s)

External device communication: Communicating to external device located on the host
Data Logging: Send output to virtual serial port to be stored on Datastore for later processing

Potential configuration

source "vsphere-iso" "my_base_template" {
  ...
  serial = "FILE:[Datastore] directory/output_file"
  ...
}

source "vsphere-iso" "my_base_template" {
  ...
  serial = "DEVICE:/dev/ttyS0,yield=true"
  ...
}

source "vsphere-iso" "my_base_template" {
  ...
  serial = "DEVICE:COM1"
  ...
}

Potential References

VMware documentation on Using Serial Ports with vSphere Virtual Machines
VMware VM Hardware Serial APIs
Serial port configuration in packer-plugin-vmware

hashicorp / packer-plugin-vsphere