How to create OVA Templates for VMware

[sandabot]

Since there's so little available resources for .ova cloud images that should be compatible with cloudstack, I tried creating my own.

I booted an Ubuntu iso on vmware, installed cloud-config, prepared everything, shut down the VM, exported the OVF package, converted the bundle to a single OVA file with ovftool then registered the template into cloudstack.

When booting, I get kernel panic everytime, so I'm assuming it's just some unconfigured disk.

My question is: what's the proper way to create Cloudstack & VMware compatible OVA templates, with cloud-config, that will pull their configuration from cloudstack?

I've only seen Ubuntu having an official .ova cloud template, but mounting it won't get configured, I'm assuming it doesn't have cloud-config or is just not compatible with cloudstack since it won't configure the network, or add a ssh key, or pull user data. I mean this one https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/noble/current/noble-server-cloudimg-amd64.ova . And I can't check since there's no way to authenticate into this template without password configuration or ssh key.

I know that downloading premade templates from the internet is bad practice, but where can I get some compatible .OVA templates for VMware?

[ingox]

To be able to login to predefined images you need to have "password enabled" turned on in your template. Once the VM got deployed you'll get a password you can use to login.

If you create your own OVA files, did you try to install the VMware tools for Linux?
https://www.liquidweb.com/blog/how-to-install-vmware-tools-ubuntu/

[weizhouapache]

I booted an Ubuntu iso on vmware, installed cloud-config, prepared everything, shut down the VM, exported the OVF package, converted the bundle to a single OVA file with ovftool then registered the template into cloudstack.

you can create a template from the ROOT volume when the VM is stopped