@newknowledge Thanks, I'll try it out later.

@olivierlambert I see the drive attached to the new VM but it is not mounted. After mounting, I can see the contents of cloud-init config and everything looks ok unless I missed something:

drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 16384 Jan  1  1970 ./
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root  4096 May 22 18:58 ../
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root    50 May 22 18:54 meta-data*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root   104 May 22 18:54 network-config*
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root  2048 May 22 18:54 openstack/
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root   469 May 22 18:54 user-data*
root@cloudbase:/mnt# cat user-data
#cloud-config
hostname: testingtheothertime0
timezone: America/New_York
package_update: true
package_upgrade: true
packages:
  - htop
  - tree
  - vim
  - ffmpeg
write_files:
  - content: |
    network:
      ethernets:
        eth0:
          addresses:
            - 192.168.0.22/24
      gateway4: 192.168.0.1
      nameservers:
        addresses:
          - 192.168.0.1
    version: 2
    path: /etc/netplan/00-installer-config.yaml
runcmd:
  - [ netplan, apply ]
root@cloudbase:/mnt# cat network-config
#network:
#  version: 1
#  config:
#  - type: physical
#    name: eth0
#    subnets:
#      - type: dhcproot@cloudbase:/mnt#
root@cloudbase:/mnt# cat meta-data
instance-id: 3824858a-0679-2863-5416-e03640479e8c
root@cloudbase:/mnt#

From the cloud config, the packages were not installed. Also, tried the do the networking in different ways but nothing worked.

@MrMike nope, not working.

• Created VM
• Installed guest-tools
• Installed cloud init, cloud-initramfs-growroot
• Updated /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg
• Updated /usr/lib/cloud-init/ds-identify with lines given above
• Created template
• Created new vm from template using cloud init config on XO
• New VM has nothing from the cloud init config...

I could see how you could tweak the /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg with the users, etc. But cloud.cfg should have minimal settings on it. All the settings and configuration should come from the cloud init config in XO.

@MrMike Great, thanks. I'll try this out.

@MrMike could you please post the changes to ds-identity file? Also, I don't see the /usr/lib/cloud-init/ds-identify.ORIGINAL file. Is this something that gets created after the new VM is created?

@geek-baba oh ok, so are you bypassing cloud init altogether? How do you handle the network config? I was hoping to at least setup network + ssh key and then I could mange with Ansible after that.

Initially tried using Terraform with XO, but this cloud init issue may be the problem why I was having an issue getting them to work together.

@geek-baba Thanks, do you happen to have some steps on the additional changes you made to the VM before converting in to the template?

@olivierlambert just tried to go through the process again from what the example gave. Included the extra lines you mentioned above for the datasource. But it is still not seeing any of the custom cloud init settings that I configured.

Is the template VM somehow badly configured? Is there anything on here that is outdated: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/centos-cloud-template-for-xenserver/

I'll continue debugging this issue but would be nice to have a guide on how to make cloud init work. Seems like there is something either missing or not working on the current guide (maybe XO bug?).

Looking at the docs again, seems like the cloud-init config didn't really work:

Hostname is set to: cloudtest

Result (host name is not correct )

@olivierlambert Seems like the cloud init config that gets run is the one under:

/var/lib/cloud/seed/nocloud-net/user-data

Have checked all the different logs and there is nothing about the custom cloud-init config that I selected during VM creation using XenOrchestra.

@olivierlambert I tried it with Ubuntu 18.04 and installed cloud init when creating the template.