Whilst working on creating a new Packer deployment set with version 1.6.2, I had some strange issues whereby the Windows Server 2019 ISO on my vSphere datastore would randomly not connect. I admit I did scratch my head a bit on this one. Through some ‘Google-Fu’ I found an issue that is going to be resolved in the next release of Packer.

The issue appears to be related to having characters other than a letter or number in the datastore name that held my iso. After I removed the ‘-‘ character from my datastore name, everything worked fine!