Cannot get Cloud-Init to run with Ubuntu 18.04/CentOS 7 and vRA 82.

[5mall5nail5]

Hey all,

I have followed the VMware documentation (and blog articles, and other blogs as a result of Google Fu) for creating an Ubuntu 18.04 template w/ necessary prep for cloud-init to work.  I have configured the Blueprint/Cloud Template in vRA to do a static network assignment from internal IPAM and that's working properly it appears, but if I use a "runcmd" or "package" such as:

cloudConfig: |
#cloud-config
packages:
- nginx
runcmd:
- mkdir /tmp/cloudtest

I cannot, for the life of me, get it to make the director (in any path, I've tried several) or install any packages.

Can anyone provide any insight or tips?

Thanks all!

[5mall5nail5]

Providing a little more detail as I watched the following video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL1WwGza1kQ

I followed this tutorial step by step just to confirm I am not missing anything.  I even went so far as to install off of the Ubuntu 18.04.2 live CD just as the poster in the video does.  Confirmed there's no config in /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/* that contains any network-disabling lines.  I can get an IP address assigned to the VM, but runcmd will not do any in-guest operations.  Even checked that /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg has the runcmd module available, and it does.

I did "dpkg-reconfigure cloud-init" and selected just the OVF datasource.

After booting, I checked cloud-init status with "sudo cloud-init status --long" and see:

Status:  Error

Detail:

No instance datasource found.
Can not apply stage config, no datasource found!  Likely bad things to come!
Can not apply stage final, no datasource found!  Likely bad things to come!

Never during the deployment do I see an ISO attached to the VM... which would explain, likely, why there is no datasource available.  Not sure if this is a bug in the guest or an issue in vRA 8.2.  I do not see a failed attempt, either, within vCenter or from preliminary logs in vRA.