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.