Hello,
I wanted to share an open source project, FVORGE, that we use in house to rapidly, and with repeatable consistency, deploy a Linux VM guest that will configure itself based on the set of OVF properties that you apply.
Using VMware’s OVF properties for a virtual appliance you can take a stock Linux guest and configure networking, storage, packages, users, applicatons among other things; supporting RHEL, CentOS, SLES and Oracle Linux.
It is hosted at GitHub and is open sourced GPLv3.
There is wiki documentation and more importantly an OVF Template which has the project setup for you to kick the tires.
Again, this project was created and used in house but has proved useful enough that we’d like to share it with the community. It is a 1.x release so any and all that find it useful and would like to help it grow are more than welcome!!
https://github.com/siostech/fvorge
https://github.com/siostech/fvorge/wiki
Thanks.
-James