For reference, Apple currently has roughly 70 billion USD as cash on hands. 2.5 million USD is 0.0035% of their cash reserves.
If you have a yearly salary of 50k USD, that would be equivalent to losing 1.78 USD.
I am bad at math, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
It was definitely a headache for me as well, but you need a guest agent (like vmwaretools or qemu-guest-agent), a cloud init ready template for the distro of your choice, a cloud init config file (network/user/vendor) and a custom SCSI/ide cloudinit cdrom mounted at boot on your VM. You also can find cloudinit logs on your VM to try and figure out what’s missing or what went wrong.