Deploying vSphere-HAProxy appliance failed to get its IP address on or after vSphere 8.0U3b

Products

• VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service
• VMware vDefend Firewall with Advanced Threat Prevention

Issue/Introduction

Without the changes described in this document, the HAProxy appliance will power on, but never receive an IP address. 

Environment

vSphere 8.0u3b onwards

Cause

• There is a change to the default behavior of cloud-init guestInfo variables that results in the HAProxy appliance from https://github.com/haproxytech/vmware-haproxy being unable to configure its networking at boot. 
• The vmware.log file for the haproxy vm located in /vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>/<haproxy_vm_name>/vmware.log includes one or more of the following lines below:

<date><time> In(05) vmx - GuestRpc: Permission denied for setting key guestinfo.metadata
<date><time> In(05) vmx - GuestRpc: Permission denied for setting key guestinfo.userdata
<date><time> In(05) vmx - GuestRpc: Permission denied for setting key guestinfo.vendordata
<date><time> In(05) vmx - GuestRpc: Permission denied for setting key guestinfo.metadata.encoding 
<date><time> In(05) vmx - GuestRpc: Permission denied for setting key guestinfo.userdata.encoding
<date><time> In(05) vmx - GuestRpc: Permission denied for setting key guestinfo.vendordata.encoding

Resolution

Add the configuration settings to the deployed appliance:

1. Deploy the appliance in a powered off state
2. Edit the deployed VM and add the following key/value pair under the  "Advanced Options" tab
   
   guest_rpc.auth.cloud-init.set=FALSE
   
   
3. Save the changes to the VM and power on the appliance.

The appliance should power on and receive its configured IP address