Comment 7 for bug 1833623

I think you'll want to run:

cloud-init clean --logs

After doing your changes to the images; this will remove most cloud-init state.

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cloud-init will always run on each boot that it detects that it has data to process. So on VMWare, if an OVF iso is provided, or the vmdata is set in the DMI tables; then cloud-init runs.

Each datasource reads the instance-id, which is just a unique string to identify the instance and cloud-init remembers this value such that on reboots we don't duplicate "first boot" operations. However, if the image is captured and booted somewhere else (where it would get a different instance id) then it would do the firstboot things again.

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You shouldn't need to disable cloud-init; but you likely need to clean-up after your first boot sequence.