Adding support for a VMware Tools release data source

[YuriyAM]

We use vsphere-iso to build Windows templates and attach a VMware Tools ISO from Broadcom’s public repository https://packages-prod.broadcom.com/tools/

Currently, we resolve the latest Windows release through custom scripts, construct the ISO URL, and pass it to Packer as a variable. We get version metadata from https://packages-prod.broadcom.com/tools/versions

Would a data source like this fit the scope of packer-plugin-vsphere?

data "vsphere_vmware_tools" "latest" {
  guest_os = "windows"
}

source "vsphere-iso" "windows" {
  # Other configuration omitted
  iso_url = data.vsphere_vmware_tools.latest.iso_url
  iso_checksum = data.vsphere_vmware_tools.latest.iso_checksum
}

The goal is to resolve the latest VMware Tools ISO directly from Packer configuration without requiring a separate manual step or supporting script.

[tenthirtyam]

Hi @YuriyAM 👋🏻

We'll take this into consideration for a future release; however, there would be a preference to investigate methods that don't rely on web scraping.

Ryan Johnson, Broadcom