Aria Automation Deployed VMs with Cloud Config Show Automatically Mounted ISO File in vCenter for the Respective Virtual Machine

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

Virtual machines (VMs) deployed through VMware Aria Automation, some VMs appear with an ISO file mounted in vCenter under the CD/DVD drive settings.

Environment

Aria Automation 8.x

Resolution

This behavior is expected for VMs that use cloud-init with cloud-config for guest customization during deployment.

When a VM is deployed from an OVF or OVA template that includes cloud-init configuration, vSphere automatically generates and attaches a temporary ISO file.

This ISO file contains OVF environment data, which includes metadata and configuration details that cloud-init reads during the first boot to apply guest customization settings such as:

• Network configuration
• Hostname assignment
• User data and initialization scripts