Comment 28 for bug 1835205

Just wanted to chime in here as a Vmware user that is suffering from the current implementation, to give some food for thought.

I do not really see what any of the proposed changes would fix. The root of all the issues is:

- Vmware customization using a file (vmware-imc) only supports network config, but no user-data or anything else, and is thus quite useless for cloud-init.
- Vmware customization using the OVF file supports user-data and is persistent, but does not support any network config, and is thus quite useless for setting up a VM as well.

What I do not understand, is why all this effort is not put in providing network config through the OVF file (which can be easily done by just adding a 'meta-data' base64 string next to the 'user-data' base64 string). A bug is open for this (#1247055) but there does not seem to be happening a lot there.

As the vmware-imc customization will never offer any user-data _and_ has the problem that is disappears, using that in any sensible way requires fixing the data source caching, but also fixing a merge between OVF data and IMC data (which is bug #1806133). If any of these issues are not fixed, it will only be possible to provide network config through IMC, but supplying any OVF user-data will always trigger a re-init on next reboot, breaking the system.

From the Vmware point of view, I do not understand why they don't put their efforts in getting cloud-init-vmware-guestinfo merged into the main cloud-init tree, and subsequently adding support for this in VCloud Director (which is unable to set these guestinfo properties at the moment).

I would be happy to look into supporting meta-data through the OVF file, and is seems quite trivial, but let me know if I'm missing something here and if it doesn't make sense.