VME Trial doesn't include everything?

[nate8942]

Hello,

New to VME, been using VMware since 1999, hoping/expecting to deploy VME at my org soon.. I have zero experience with any hypervisor other than VMware. I have ~30 years of Linux experience though.

The way I currently provision VMs is I use a tool called "govc" in VMware and populate custom metadata in the VM, so when it is built, scripts kick off and read that metadata to know what settings to set whether it is networking info, hostname, and custom file system configurations.

For example, when building a VM with a custom ZFS configuration the VM queries some options and the script interpets the results on the details around the config:

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# vmtoolsd --cmd "info-get guestinfo.sd.zfs.install"
1
# vmtoolsd --cmd "info-get guestinfo.sd.zfs.zpool.size"
10
# vmtoolsd --cmd "info-get guestinfo.sd.zfs.zpool.options"
-o autotrim=on
# vmtoolsd --cmd "info-get guestinfo.sd.zfs.fs.names"
myzfsname
# vmtoolsd --cmd "info-get guestinfo.sd.zfs.zpool.name"
HOSTNAME

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I am sure there is a way to store custom metadata in KVM(not sure how yet), though not sure how to retrieve it from the guest..

VME seems to want to use cloud-init for Ubuntu. While I use Ubuntu, I've never used cloud-init, unsure if it can do what I need it to do (main thing is storing config values for the VMs to retrieve as well as set static network configs). My current processes I build a very basic template, with just a few minor changes to enable /etc/rc.local, then when the new VM powers up all it does is download a script and execute it. Then I can make whatever changes I need to the script without having to touch the template again. Eventually towards the end of provisioning Chef/Cinc kicks off to configure the system in the role that is defined for it(also set in VM metadata).

But anyway, the main point of this post is that I tried what I think I may need to do using the morpheus CLI to set a custom metadata setting in an instance but got an error back saying my license doesn't cover that feature

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$ morpheus instances setenv ubuntu24-vmetemplate-v1 MyIP 10.30.16.121 -r tmpvmemanage-01
Error Communicating with the remote appliance. 403 Forbidden
Feature Not Included for the Applied License

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I am using a blank/trial license, is there another more feature complete trial license?

thanks