RHEL 10 admin password not set by guest customization for VMware Cloud Director

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

• When deploying a RHEL 10 or Rocky 10 template in VMware Cloud Director, the admin password is not set by guest customization, as expected.

Environment

VMware Cloud Director 10.6.x

Cause

Guest customization functionality is provided by the underlying vSphere and is contingent on compatibility with that environment. For example, there are some limitations with guest customization of RHEL 10 in earlier versions of vSphere 8.0 as in the following issue where the deprecation of ifcfg-rh in the operating system can cause the guest customization of network configuration to fail prior to 8.0U3b:

Guest OS Customization may fail to customize RHEL 10.x

Resolution

To work around potential limitations with the underlying guest customization, switch to the cloud-init customization mechanism, as detailed in the document below:

How to switch vSphere Guest OS Customization engine for Linux virtual machine

Additional Information

For more information regarding guest customization compatibility, please refer to the following:

Guest OS Compatibility

Configure a guest customization method for an unsupported Linux distribution

For additional information on how cloud-init is used to customize a Linux VM, please refer to the following item:

How does vSphere Guest OS Customization work with cloud-init to customize a Linux VM