Comment 31 for bug 1793715

Exactly so our current workflow looks like this:

- We deploy the ova (not using any cloud-init at all - it never gets powered on)
- We mark this machine directly as a template for reuse

Now in our playbooks we use this template to deploy new machines.

For every machine we generate the cloud-init configurations for guest-config and network-config dynamically and create a cloud-init.iso file.

The network-config file contains:

- static ip address
- netmask
- nameservers

(I think the network config could be done with the guest-customizations now - this apparently was different in the past, when no netplan config was generated by the open-vm-tools. so we might skip this now, if the customizations work)

This guest-config file contains:

- user accounts (that might differ between VMs)
- ssh-keys (that might also differ between VMs)
- Some special runcmds depending on the machine

This setup is VM specific, so we can not do it during the ova deployment but only for every machine itself.

I hope this clears up the situation a bit of how we currently use it.
If there is anything blatantly wrong about this workflow I am happy to hear it, we setup this workflow only about 8 months ago, so we are not sure if this is the way it should be used.