OVF does not read user-data if vmware IMC is used.

[Scott Moser]

As currently implemented, cloud-init will read either OVF CDrom *or* the vmware IMC data.

That means if user-data is provided in the OVF environment file then it will not be consumed at all by cloud-init.

It seems we need to either:
 a.) support reading and merging these two sources of information
 b.) provide some way to feed user-data through the IMC path separately.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 19.04
Package: cloud-init 18.4-24-g8f812a15-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.18.0-11.12-generic 4.18.12
Uname: Linux 4.18.0-11-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu14
Architecture: amd64
CloudName: LXD
Date: Fri Nov 30 21:56:38 2018
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=C.UTF-8
SourcePackage: cloud-init
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
user_data.txt:
 #cloud-config
 {}

[Chad Smith (chad.smith)]

After discussion on this bug, we've decided the best approach for cloud-init in the short term is to extend the OVF datasource to allow for setting datasource configuration options to allow merging from both VMWare IMC data and OVF user-data.

Such configuration would be provided in /etc/cloud/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/90_somename.cfg

Datasource:
  OVF:
      mergemetadata: true|false  # If true, merge metadata from any DataSourceOVF-supported source
      mergeorder: [ovf, vmware-tools]

The mergeorder above says that any vmware-tools(IMC) metadata will override any discovered duplicate configuration keys found in ovf.

[James Falcon (falcojr)]

Tracked in Github Issues as https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/issues/3290