Vmware no longer supports image cloning

[Aitelkabous Mohamed]

Hello
As you can see in the KB https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/84280, vmware no longer supports cloning esxi images to deploy a server from MAAS.
To reproduce it:

- Deploy esxi
- Enable ssh
- esxcli system uuid get

- remove server
- deploy esxi
- enable ssh
- esxcli system uuid get

And uuid will be same.

Can you confirm that vmware supports your deployment method for esxi7?

Regards/Cdlt
Mohamed

[Bill Wear (billwear)]

changing status to high, based on conversations with support and SEG. L2 support customer, tho UA App, not UA MAAS. escalating quickly, SEG involved, will probably call on us to address this if they can't figure this out. customer is also escalating this to VMWare, apparently.

[Alexsander de Souza (alexsander-souza)]

MAAS uses cloning as the mechanism to deploy all supported OS. This is explicitly not supported by VMWare since ESXi 7.0 U2, as doing so could lead to data corruption if VMFS volumes are shared among hosts cloned using the same image. This is a VMWare's design choice and there's no supported workaround.

MAAS images should be safe for standalone hosts and if you don't use any kind of shared storage.