For a small environment I'm tasked to create automated infrastructure deployment for a couple of virtual machines running on a single ESXi host (without vCenter). The VMs should run CentOS 8 and I will use ansible later on to configure the services.
In the past I regularly used packer to build my OS image, which I can do with a standalone host as well. It will not be a template but a VM, but it works fine to create my base template. Without vCenter I cannot copy or clone the VM though as this operation is not supported on a standalone host.
How can I create (fully automated) a VM with CentOS 8 installed ideally by using terraform only? I was thinking to call packer from terraform, but its really not designed to work this way.