Since the early days of Virtual Center and ESX, the only method for creating and sharing arbitrary metadata between the vSphere Management layer and the guest operating system was to use either guest variables (guestinfo) or the OVF runtime environment.
While both of these capabilities have enabled a ton of interesting use cases and have even inspired creative solutions such as this, this, this, this and this to just name a few, it certainly has its challenges and nuances from an end user experience perspective.
For example, the persistency or the non-persistency of guest variables solely depended on when it was applied to a Virtual Machine and the power state it was in, which can be very frustrating to discover for the first time and the inconsistent behavior for end users. The lack of security and access control in both guest variables and the OVF runtime environment also means the metadata could easily be overwritten or removed by users in either the vSphere Management layer or guest operating system, making this challenging to scale for larger organizations.
This is why I am excited for vSphere 8 and the new vSphere Dataset feature!
