Hello all,
DEVOps team ask me for help because they are using Terraform as infrastructure lifecycle management framework that among other things creates, changes and destroy virtual machines.
When requesting to create a VM, Terraform templates selects VM/VApp Template based on its name.
When created, Terraform stores the UUID of the template in a "statefile". This state file basically is used to achieve idempotency, meaning, that when executed again, Terraform will only apply changes, and here starts the challenge (at least to me) 
.
We have multiple templates (OS flavors, etc) and the problem is, whenever, for some reason, we need to update a template, in fact from a VMware perspective is a new template (distinct UUID).
This creates a situation where we need to keep all the versions of templates, as long as there is a VM that was provisioned with it. If we delete a template, whenever we execute the Terraform it will notice that the UUID doesn't exist which in some situations origins the destroy and create a new VM, which is not desirable.
So, we are looking for an approach where we could keep the UUID on VM Template. Is there a procedure to do that? How could we achieve this? for instance using a powercli command/script where UUID of template would be update (we understand the risks that this could involve in case of failure, like duplicate UUIDs or similar).
We use Hashicorp Packer to maintain a continuous integration/continuous delivery Pipeline for VM Templates so any GUI driven approach isn't viable!
Can anyone help?
Thanks.
Regards
