Multi-NIC VMs with static IPs in VCF Automation

A basic VCF Automation cloud template has one machine and one network resource. Every VM it builds gets exactly one NIC, and whether that NIC gets DHCP or a static IP is decided by the network profile behind it, not by the person making the request. A recent request asked for much more control: up to three NICs per VM, each one static or DHCP as the requester chooses, any number of data disks with their own sizes, NTP servers, and a login user, all from one request form.

None of that is exotic, but getting it all to work together took a few tries and turned up some gotchas worth sharing. In this post I’ll walk through the template inputs, the Network Configure subscription and its vRO workflow, cloud-init for NTP, and the VM template problem that cost me the most time. Everything is downloadable at the end, including a vRO package and a VCFA Ledger package.

Tested on: VCF Automation 9.1 (VM Apps organization) with its built-in VCF Operations Orchestrator 9.1.1 (build 25643527), vCenter cloud account, and an Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS template (cloud-init 26.1, open-vm-tools 13.0.10).

What the template does

Feature	How it works
Up to 3 NICs, all optional	Three Cloud.vSphere.Network resources, each with count 0 or 1
Static or DHCP per NIC	Custom properties on the machine, read by a Network Configure subscription that returns per-NIC IP settings
Any number of data disks, each its own size	One Cloud.vSphere.Disk with count and allocatePerInstance: true
NTP servers	cloud-init runcmd script (chrony or systemd-timesyncd)
Login user	cloud-init runcmd script, from two optional form fields

Every field on the form is optional apart from Project and Deployment Name, which VCF Automation needs to submit a request at all.

How the pieces fit together

1. The requester fills in the custom form: per NIC a network, DHCP yes or no and, for a static NIC, the IP address and netmask. Plus the data disk sizes, NTP servers and a login.
2. The cloud template turns the inputs into resources (networks, disks, machine) and copies the NIC settings into custom properties like cpNic1IpAddress.
3. During allocation, VCF Automation fires the Network Configure event. A blocking subscription runs the vRO workflow, which returns per-NIC addresses, CIDRs, gateways and DNS.
4. VCF Automation applies those settings through guest customization when it clones the VM.
5. On first boot, cloud-init runs the cloudConfig from the template and sets NTP and the login user.

Step 4 depends on the VM template being clean, so let’s start there.