I have forked the charm we had deployed (version 252) and applied thedac's patch to the nova.conf template for mitaka (there was no template/newton/nova.conf in 252). Without any other configuration, I launched a RHEL 7.5 instance and it received the correct hostname. I also verified the expected behavior is still consistent on an Ubuntu 18.04 instance.
In both cases, the meta-data has the correct hostname with the configured domain (and not novalocal).
I have forked the charm we had deployed (version 252) and applied thedac's patch to the nova.conf template for mitaka (there was no template/ newton/ nova.conf in 252). Without any other configuration, I launched a RHEL 7.5 instance and it received the correct hostname. I also verified the expected behavior is still consistent on an Ubuntu 18.04 instance.
In both cases, the meta-data has the correct hostname with the configured domain (and not novalocal).