Amazon Web Services yesterday announced they now have Amazon Machine images available for Windows Server 2016. This includes Nano Server, a perfect solution for a roll your own IaaS server to host your .NET Core APIs. Windows Server 2016 Nano Server -A cloud-native, minimal install that takes up a modest amount of disk space and boots more swiftly than the Datacenter version, while leaving more system resources (memory, storage, and CPU) available to run apps and services.

When you are building Windows Server 2012 R2 base images (vSphere Templates) using packer on vSphere (using vmware-iso packer builder); the process usually relies on the windows server to get an IP address automatically via DHCP. This allows the packer builder to then communicate to the server over WinRM and complete the provisioning. What happens when there is no DHCP available in your vSphere VM Network? The easy solution is to have the bootstrap of the windows server set a static IP for the server.