OVF#
The OVF datasource provides a datasource for reading data from an Open Virtualization Format ISO transport.
Graceful rpctool fallback#
The datasource initially attempts to use the program vmware-rpctool
if it
is available. However, if the program returns a non-zero exit code, then the
datasource falls back to using the program vmtoolsd
with the --cmd
argument.
On some older versions of ESXi and open-vm-tools, the vmware-rpctool
program is much more performant than vmtoolsd
. While this gap was
closed, it is not reasonable to expect the guest where cloud-init is running to
know whether the underlying hypervisor has the patch.
Additionally, vSphere VMs may have the following present in their VMX file:
guest_rpc.rpci.auth.cmd.info-set = "TRUE"
guest_rpc.rpci.auth.cmd.info-get = "TRUE"
The above configuration causes the vmware-rpctool
command to return a
non-zero exit code with the error message Permission denied
. If this should
occur, the datasource falls back to using vmtoolsd
.
Additional information#
For further information see a full working example in cloud-init
’s
source code tree in doc/sources/ovf
.