VMWare

The VMWare support in pycloudlib is specific to vSphere. In particular, vSphere 7 was tested.

Prerequisites

VMWare usage in Pycloudlib requires the govc command line tool to be available on the PATH. See VMWare docs for installation information.

Available Images

To create new instances, pycloudlib will clone an existing VM within vSphere that is designated as the image source. In order to qualify, the VM must meet the following requirements:

A standard (non-template) VM.
Powered off
In the same folder that new VMs will be deployed to (see folder in pycloudlib.toml)
Have the “InjectOvfEnv” setting be false.
Be named appropriately: TEMPLATE-cloud-init-<release>

As of this writing, TEMPLATE-cloud-init-focal and TEMPLATE-cloud-init-jammy are valid source VMs.

To create the Ubuntu-based source images, the following procedure was followed for a Jammy image:

Download the .ova for the release from the release server
govc import.spec ubuntu-jammy-server-cloudimg-amd64.ova | python -m json.tool > ubuntu.json
Modify the json file appropriately
govc import.ova -options=ubuntu.json ./ubuntu-jammy-server-cloudimg-amd64.ova

Example ubuntu.json:

{
    "DiskProvisioning": "thin",
    "IPAllocationPolicy": "dhcpPolicy",
    "IPProtocol": "IPv4",
    "PropertyMapping": [
        {
            "Key": "instance-id",
            "Value": ""
        },
        {
            "Key": "hostname",
            "Value": ""
        },
        {
            "Key": "seedfrom",
            "Value": ""
        },
        {
            "Key": "public-keys",
            "Value": ""
        },
        {
            "Key": "user-data",
            "Value": ""
        },
        {
            "Key": "password",
            "Value": ""
        }
    ],
    "NetworkMapping": [
        {
            "Name": "VM Network",
            "Network": "VLAN_2763"
        }
    ],
    "MarkAsTemplate": false,
    "PowerOn": false,
    "InjectOvfEnv": false,
    "WaitForIP": false,
    "Name": "TEMPLATE-cloud-init-jammy"
}

SSH Keys

To avoid cloud-init detecting an instance as an OVF datasource, passing a public key through ovf xml is not supported. Rather, when the instance is created, the pycloudlib managed ssh public key is added to the cloud-config user data of the instance. This means that the user data on the launched instance will always contain an extra public key compared to what was passed to pycloudlib.

Blocking calls

Since calls to govc are blocking, specifying wait=False to enable non-blocking calls will not work.