Thank you for your reply Luca,
In general your work flow is helpful and makes sense to me.
I meant to say above- "As part of the template creation process ***the Ovirt docs***
say to seal the VM".
So I think I understand that you need to use both processes (seal template + cloudinit) to
get everything to work as desired. I'd still appreciate any more specifics about what
sealing a VM does.