rowanjacobs / terraform-provider-vsphereovf

Terraform provider (DRAFT) allowing OVF uploads to vSphere.

Terraform vSphere OVF Provider

This is a draft (not yet working!) Terraform provider that will allow users to upload OVF and OVA files to vCenter. It is not ready for use yet!

Note:

So far, the provider can successfully upload and delete templates. However, it cannot be used to feed the newly created template into the Terraform vSphere provider.

This will probably never actually work properly, barring some very unlikely changes to the vSphere provider or the Terraform lifecycle. Here's why:

The vsphere_virtual_machine resource has a CustomizeDiff step that, when cloning a template, explicitly checks that template exists as part of validation. Without having some way to short-circuit this step, a user cannot upload a vSphere template and clone that template in the same terraform apply.

Given that all the prospective users I have talked to have selected other means of paving vSphere environments (either by abandoning Terraform entirely or abandoning it in vSphere specifically), and given the (entirely reasonable) resistance of the Terraform maintainers for supporting this use case, I do not have very much external motivation to keep working on this project. Short of discovering a way to short-circuit clone validation, this may be my last commit to this repo.

What's done

• upload an OVF or OVA template to vCenter
• mark the resulting VM as a template or virtual machine
• set network mappings on the template
• export template UUID or name to be used by the vSphere provider
• destroy the template

What's left to do

• figure out what's with the 4 minute gap between "creating template resource" and "importing template as vApp"
• find a way to bypass clone validation
• update the template
• otherwise customize the template
• documentation