Comment 26 for bug 1944946

Since we will slip final freeze of 21.10 not yet having that confirmation we should start preparing the SRU template which we will need later on anyway. Just to pre-eliminate any later stalls.

For that the biggest missing piece for me is the "how to reproduce" you said it affects customization via cloud-init on vmware guests.
It wasn't stated how a setup for repro for would look like yet.

I currently lack a system to test this, so I've drafted steps based on the code but would like to ask you @John to revise them. Mission - as always - is to keep them as simple as possible which e.g. implies to - if possible - not use advanced VMWare host configurations.

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But from studying the code I see a few things that make me wonder which exact config is needed to reach the code that is affected by this. Here from ds-identify code.

 991 dscheck_OVF() {
 992 check_seed_dir ovf ovf-env.xml && return "${DS_FOUND}"

If an image was built placing data in /var/lib/cloud/seed/ovf/...
That should not happen in a fresh clear environment and will likely be stepped over.

 994 [ "${DI_VIRT}" = "none" ] && return ${DS_NOT_FOUND}

This is only an early exit, if it is vmware it continues to check the rest

 996 # Azure provides ovf. Skip false positive by dis-allowing.
 997 is_azure_chassis && return $DS_NOT_FOUND

Not important in our cases as we are not talking about Azure, will be stepped over

 999 ovf_vmware_transport_guestinfo && return "${DS_FOUND}"

If here vmware-rpctool "info-get guestinfo.ovfEnv" gets content it returns with DS_FOUND

1001 has_ovf_cdrom && return "${DS_FOUND}"

If cloud-init config data is presented via cdrom it returns here.

1003 ovf_vmware_guest_customization && return "${DS_FOUND}"

Only if it stepped over all of the above, no config CDrom, no data via vmware-rpctool then the code of "ovf_vmware_guest_customization" which has the issue with the new path will be ran.

1005 return ${DS_NOT_FOUND}

This is the final, nothing found return

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WIP Steps to reproduce to improve on
1. set up a VMWare based Ubuntu guest
 1.1 does the user or the tooling have to set disable_vmware_customization ?
     something like
     echo "search,found=all,maybe=all,notfound=disabled,disable_vmware_customization=false" | sudo tee /etc/cloud/ds-identify.cfg

 1.2 do any other options/customizations matter?

2. in the Ubuntu guest run ds-identify and check if the output detected vmware correctly

 2.1 $ sudo /usr/lib/cloud-init/ds-identify

 2.2 $ cat /run/cloud-init/cloud.cfg

In the good case this looks like ???
In the bad case it fails to detect VMware and looks like ???