I was introduced to Packer by one of my coworkers, @rms1000watt, while describing my setup at home. I have a SMB network full of various appliance servers running as VMs on an ESXi server. Since I'm not a datacenter brimming with the cash to pay for vCenter or Puppet premium recipes I've been hand-rolling my VMs. But, NO LONGER!!! Enter Packer (and Terraform, et cetera).
The details for installation are covered at https://www.packer.io/intro/getting-started/install.html. Just download your flavor, unzip, and move the binary to your folder of choice. I chose /usr/local/bin/packer.
Turns out all Redhat-based distros (maybe all distros?) with cracklib installed already have a binary called packer. So, if you get an error running packer similar to the following...