VMware guestinfo cloud-init configuration for AL2023 on VMware - Amazon Linux 2023
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VMware guestinfo cloud-init configuration for AL2023 on VMware

VMware environments do not have the Amazon EC2 Instance Meta Data Service (IMDS), so an alternate method of configuring AL2023 is required. This section describes how to use an alternative configuration mechanism to the seed.iso virtual CD-ROM drive that is available in VMware vSphere.

This method of configuration uses the VMware extraconfig mechanism to provide configuration data to cloud-init. For each of the following keys, a corresponding keyname.encoding property must be provided.

The following keys can be provided to the VMware extraconfig mechanism.

guestinfo.metadata

JSON or YAML containing cloud-init meta-data

guestinfo.userdata

A YAML document containing cloud-init user-data in the cloud-config format.

guestinfo.vendordata (optional)

YAML containing cloud-init vendor-data

The corresponding encoding properties ( guestinfo.metadata.encoding, guestinfo.userdata.encoding, and guestinfo.vendordata.encoding) can contain:

base64

The content of the property is base64 encoded.

gzip+base64

The content of the property is compressed with gzip after base64 encoding.

Note

The seed.iso method supports a separate (optional) network-config configuration file. VMware guestinfo differs in how the networking configuration is provided. Additional information is provided in the following section.

If an explicit network configuration is desired, it should be embedded in the metadata in the form of two YAML or JSON properties:

network

Contains the encoded network configuration in JSON or YAML form.

network.encoding

Contains the encoding of the above network configuration data. The cloud-init supported encodings are the same as for the guestinfo data: base64 and gzip+base64.

Example Using the VMware vSphere govc CLI tool to pass configuration with guestinfo

  1. Prepare the meta-data, user-data, and optional network-config configuration files as described in NoCloud (seed.iso) cloud-init configuration for Amazon Linux 2023 on KVM and VMware.

  2. Convert the configuration files into formats usable by VMware guestinfo. 

    # 'meta-data', `user-data` and `network-config` are the configuration
# files in the same format that would be used by a NoCloud (seed.iso)
# data source, read-them and convert them to VMware guestinfo
#
# The VM_NAME variable is assumed to be set to the name of the VM
# It is assumed that the necessary govc environment (credentials etc...) are already set

metadata=$(cat "meta-data")
userdata=$(cat "user-data")
if [ -e "network-config" ] ; then
    # We need to embed the network config inside the meta-data
    netconf=$(base64 -w0 "network-config")
    metadata=$(printf "%s\nnetwork: %s\nnetwork.encoding: base64" "$metadata" "$netconf")
fi
metadata=$(base64 -w0 <<< "$metadata")
govc vm.change -vm "$VM_NAME" \
    -e guestinfo.metadata="$metadata" \
    -e guestinfo.metadata.encoding="base64"
userdata=$(base64 -w0 <<< "$userdata")
govc vm.change -vm "$VM_NAME" \
    -e guestinfo.userdata="$userdata" \
    -e guestinfo.userdata.encoding="base64"