:rocket: Feature request: cloud-init network_config support

[pariviere]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Cloud init supports made available by this Ansible collection does not allow to configure RHEL/CentOS networking.

It works good with Ubuntu/Debian.

Describe the solution you'd like

Allow to use network-config configuration in the same way than user-data and meta-data

 tasks:
    - name: Create K3s server VM
      ansible.builtin.include_role:
        name: scale_computing.hypercore.template2vm
      vars:
       ....
        # cloud-init
        template2vm_user_data: "{{ lookup('template', 'user-data.rhel9.yml.j2') }}"
        template2vm_meta_data: "{{ lookup('template', 'meta-data.rhel9.yml.j2') }}"
        template2vm_network_config: "{{ lookup('template', 'network-config.rhel9.yml.j2') }}"

Describe alternatives you've considered

Build the cloud-init ISO by myself for each VM... :/

Additional context

The following cloud-init configuration does not work when using RHEL/CentOS distribution :

instance-id: iid-abcdefg
network-interfaces: |
  iface eth0 inet static
  address 192.168.1.10
  network 192.168.1.0
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  broadcast 192.168.1.255
  gateway 192.168.1.254
hostname: myhost

see https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/datasources/nocloud.html#example-meta-data.

Some processing are done by cloud-init to convert this ENI style configuration to network-configuration v1 but it seems to have bad processing which made it unusable on RHEL/CentOS.

Why not to fix cloud-init? Regarding cloud-init documentation, network-config should be the correct way to handle network configuration and does not depends on some specific feature (NoCloud and ENI in our case)

[pariviere]

I've also fill a bug in cloud-init repositiory : canonical/cloud-init#6088

[ddemlow]

the underlying REST api for Scale Computing HyperCore does not currently support including network-config for cloud-init data - I will pass along a feature request to that team to consider adding that - at which point we could include it in the ansible collection.

[ddemlow]

I did find that the following meta_data - adding auto eth0 did work for me on alma linux - perhaps you could try that?

      meta_data: |
        dsmode: local
        local-hostname: "abm{{ index }}.lab.local"
        network-interfaces: |
          auto eth0
          iface eth0 inet static
          address 192.168.0.10
          network 192.168.0.0
          netmask 255.255.255.0
          gateway 192.168.0.1

[dradX]

@pariviere Did you have time to try @ddemlow suggestion regarding the meta_data setup in cloud_init?

[dradX]

We might add an example for Alma/Rocky to the collection examples.