Originally reported in IRC, there appears to be a bug in cloud detection for VMware. The user was attempting to run a RHEL 8 instance on VMware vSphere 7.0.2
Initially the user reported an issue that appears fixed by [this patch](https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1894837/comments/8) (should we upstream this?). After applying the patch, the user ran into another issue, this time OVF was detected rather than the vmware datasource.
From the user:
> I seems that salt-cloud is the reason why. It seems to deploy using pyVmomi and using VMware Tools and VMware guest customization with the OVF datasource.
I see that cloud-init datasource detection does check for vmware tools installed [here](https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/blob/8dca3ad01827e141e13d8d1169e4d31a4d164728/tools/ds-identify#L940), which I
suspect causes ds-identify to include OVF as an option, leading to this issue.
The user has the following GH gist documenting this issue:
https://gist.github.com/jbfriedrich/348e988ba26a5a8631d7b33395a0ca90
The user worked around the datasource mis-detection, but discovered that salt-cloud doesn't configure the hypervisor correctly which leads to disabled virtual nics in the guest.
While we can't fix the salt-cloud issue, I think we should consider upstreaming the RHEL patch and fix the vmware detection issues described here.
I look through the description. Is there anything VMWware/OVF related that still needs to be investigated here? For the RHEL patch, that's not VMWare specific, and I think we can defer to https:/