VC-Deployer — Template Builder

Turn a Linux cloud image into a reusable vCenter template that the VC-Deployer clients can deploy VMs from. This is the "build once" half of the toolkit; deploying is done by VC-Deployer-Python or VC-Deployer-Shell.

Each template is stamped with a vCenter annotation describing its profile, so the clients can discover it and configure VMs without any shared files. See PROTOCOL.md for that contract.

What it does

For each OS profile, build-template.sh:

1. Downloads the cloud image (OVA or qcow2).
2. Imports it into vCenter (govc import.ova, or qemu-img → VMDK → govc import.vmdk).
3. Runs a one-time prep in the guest (enable the VMware cloud-init datasource, install open-vm-tools, generalize) via guestinfo — or, for images without open-vm-tools, via a NoCloud seed ISO.
4. Stamps the profile annotation and marks the VM as a template.

Requirements

• govc — the vCenter CLI
• qemu-img — only for qcow2 / EL-family images (e.g. Rocky)
• bash, and a host that can create the seed ISO for qcow2 images
• vCenter credentials + placement (datacenter, datastore, resource pool, network)

Configure

cp config.env.example config.env      # then edit — or keep real values elsewhere

config.env holds the GOVC_* connection + placement, global template sizing (TEMPLATE_CPUS, TEMPLATE_MEMORY_MB, TEMPLATE_DISK_GB), and the default profile. OS specifics live in profiles/*.env.

Build

./build-template.sh                 # default profile (ubuntu-2604)
./build-template.sh ubuntu-2404
./build-template.sh rocky-10        # needs qemu-img

Profiles

Profile	OS	Image	Notes
ubuntu-2604 (default)	Ubuntu 26.04 LTS	OVA	trivial import
ubuntu-2404	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS	OVA	trivial import
rocky-9	Rocky Linux 9	qcow2	qcow2→VMDK convert; seed-ISO prep
rocky-10	Rocky Linux 10	qcow2	qcow2→VMDK convert; seed-ISO prep
windows-2025	Windows Server 2025 (eval)	VHDX	see below — needs root + qemu-nbd + ntfs3

Add an OS by copying a profiles/*.env and running ./build-template.sh <name>. Each profile sets the template name, image URL/format, login user, admin group, ssh unit, and NIC name (plus, for qcow2, guest id / firmware / disk controller).

Windows (yes, really)

windows-2025 builds a template from Microsoft's evaluation VHDX (no installer pass). The flow: inject an OOBE answer file + prep script directly into the image's NTFS (qemu-nbd + the kernel ntfs3 driver — hence root, and a Linux build host), convert/import like the qcow2 path, then boot once: OOBE completes unattended and the prep script installs VMware Tools, the OpenSSH Server capability, and Cloudbase-Init configured for the VMware guestinfo datasource — so Windows clones consume the same guestinfo.* transport the Linux templates use with cloud-init — and ends with sysprep /generalize. Hardware is EFI + lsilogic-sas + e1000e (the eval image is Generation 2, and everything must boot on in-box drivers).

Hard-won notes, so nobody relearns them: the answer file must be injected at C:\Windows\Panther\unattend.xml (a seed-ISO copy is not reliably consumed at the OOBE stage of a pre-installed image), it must not contain a specialize pass (a ComputerName there loops the setup engine — clones are named by Cloudbase-Init anyway), and the licensing is Microsoft's 180-day eval. Deploy-side, Windows is DHCP-only for now.

More

DETAILS.md is a command-by-command walkthrough of the whole build, including every govc call and the hard-won cross-distro fixes.