With CentOS being less than attractive to use now when Red Hat has changed how it is updated, the Amazon AMI2 Linux distribution can be an excellent alternative.
However, when deploying an Amazon AMI2 on vSphere for the first time there are a few hoops to jump through. This video shows how to create a golden image and deploy it with Terraform in less than 15 minutes
- Code on GitHub: https://github.com/jonas-werner/terraform-amzn-ami2/blob/main/main.tf
- Official AWS instructions for image creation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-linux-2-virtual-machine.html