Using Chef I am able to access VMware vsphere, I created VMs, I can execute applications & run commands on that VM.
Will I be able to run UI based installation on the VM using chef? Please help me in this regard. Thanks in advance.
If it is windows VM use silent installation option.
Yes I am able to install SQL server silently. But what if some applications have UI based installation.
If the application only has a UI based set up process you will have to use a separate tool that clicks through the process for you in background. Try to google around a bit, there are quite a few of those (https://blog.testproject.io/2016/12/22/open-source-test-automation-tools-for-desktop-applications/).
But in my experience there is almost always an option to do the installation hands off. Sometimes those are not documented, but keep searching and ask the application support and you might be lucky.
I agree with @joerg.herzinger that the vast majority of installers have a silent install option even though they can be tricky to hunt down sometimes. I’ve only ever come across one installer I wanted to automate that had no silent install option and I user AutoIT (https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/) to script it. The weakness of this approach is that it must be run inside of an interactive logon session and will not work inside of a service or a remote connection because it must manipulate actual windows.