I have used network protocol profiles / vApp properties successfully (I used https://code.spamasaurus.com/djpbessems/Go.NPP-Prepper to configure both vCenter and VM), but did not use any values.yaml.

I have since moved away from NPP though, now using in-cluster IPAM instead.

The problem, to the best of my understanding, is because we specify vappProperties like this:

vappProperty:
  - 'guestinfo.interface.0.ip.0.address=${autoIp:vDS-My-Server-Network}'
  - 'guestinfo.interface.0.route.0.gateway=${gateway:vDS-My-Server-Network}'

The special characters are being mishandled by Helm when deploying the chart, resulting in the error above. There are at least a couple of workarounds. Either: 1. Specify the properties as text formatted as a JSON array; or 2. Update the vSphere-specific template to iterate the array and quote each item.

Even though I’m past the deployment issue, though, I still haven’t managed to make this work. Since I haven’t found any working examples of using a cluster template with vSphere and vApp/NPP, I suspect that my guess of the format of the vappProperty values is still wrong.

I didn't use helm to deploy my cluster templates, so not sure if you can escape them?

\${expression}

In the end it was pretty simple. First, we had to fix

charts/templates/nodeconfig-vsphere.yaml

in the RKE2 cluster template example repository by replacing:

vappProperty: {{ $nodepool.vappProperty }}

with:

{{- if $nodepool.vappProperty }}
vappProperty:
{{- range $nodepool.vappProperty }}
  - {{ . | quote }}
{{- end }}
{{- end }}

in two places. This took care of the error I posted at the top of this thread.

With that fixed, one can add the properties exactly as I described earlier. A cloud-init script that runs when the machine is provisioned, as outlined in Easy Static IP Configuration for Rancher Nodes, can query the values and use them to configure the network. (We did not use the script provided in this blog post, but leveraged the bits used to pull in guestinfo.ovfEnv and extract configuration to feed to

nmcli

.)