Overview of the Issue

A previously working Packer config suddenly failed to boot VMWare (using Fusion 12) machines properly - the ISO was set, but never "Connected", and the VM shows "No Operating System found".

Some comparison with a manually-created VM shows that the path for the ISO was absolute.

The only change I've made in the Packer config, was to define the iso_target_path property (I'd previously used an external step to download the ISOs for repeated use). It seems that when this path is relative, Packer understands it fine, but VMWare does not.

The work-around for now is to supply the path as absolute, but ideally Packer would handle this.

Reproduction Steps

Have a packer config with iso_target_path specified as a relative path.

Plugin and Packer version

1.712

Operating system and Environment details

macOS 11.4 on Intel.

VMWare Fusion Professional 12.1.2