Add support for deploying an OVF as a Template (not VM)

[dejarikra]

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Description

Currently, the provider has the vsphere_ovf_vm_template data object, with examples on how to use it to create a VM off of it.

However, attempting to use the vsphere_ovf_vm_template data object directly without a corresponding vsphere_vm resource doesn't actually result in creating an OVF Template on vSphere. On the other hand, such an independent template could directly be created on vSphere using the HTML client.

For reference, here is a snippet of the data object I used.

data "vsphere_ovf_vm_template" "eksa_bottlerocket" {
  name  = trimsuffix(reverse(split("/", var.eksa_bottlerocket_ova_url))[0], ".ova")

  resource_pool_id  = vsphere_resource_pool.eksa.id
  host_system_id    = vsphere_host.esxi01.id
  datastore_id      = data.vsphere_datastore.iscsi01_esxi01.id
  folder            = vsphere_folder.eksa_templates.path

  remote_ovf_url            = var.eksa_bottlerocket_ova_url
  allow_unverified_ssl_cert = true

  disk_provisioning = "thin"
  ovf_network_map = {
    "VM Network" : vsphere_distributed_port_group.VM_vcsa01.id
  }
}

I understand that data objects are NOT used to create actual resources on the target infrastructure. It would be great if we can have a corresponding resource object to create an OVF VM Template directly on vSphere.

Use Case(s)

I'm currently in the process of deploying an EKS Anywhere Cluster on my vSphere environment. As per AWS's documentation, one of the requirements is to have an OVA template already available on vSphere.

Potential Terraform Provider Configuration

I envision that the vsphere_ovf_vm_template resource be more or less similar to the vsphere_ovf_vm_template data object, whose documentation can be found here.

References

No response

[github-actions]

Hello, dejarikra! 🖐

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[tenthirtyam]

If you need to create an OVF template, why not use Packer?

[tenthirtyam]

I'm not sure the title - "Add support for deploying an OVF template to vSphere" - is an accurate description of the ask here. Today, the provider does support deploying a virtual machine from either a template as well as from a local or remote OVA/OVF. It sounds more like you are asking for the ability to deploy the OVA/OVF but set it as a template instead of powering it on.

[dejarikra]

I'm not sure the title - "Add support for deploying an OVF template to vSphere" - is an accurate description of the ask here. Today, the provider does support deploying a virtual machine from either a template as well as from a local or remote OVA/OVF. It sounds more like you are asking for the ability to deploy the OVA/OVF but set it as a template instead of powering it on.

Yes, this is exactly what I am trying to do. I will update the title accordingly.

[tenthirtyam]

More closely aligned with the existing enhancement item #1180.

[kastl-ars]

I would really like to see this feature, as it took me quite some time to find out from the big documentation that this is just not possible...

[alonkaliber]

More closely aligned with the existing enhancement item #1180.

That would be extremely helpful!