C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool RHEL5.vmx RHEL5.ova
Opening VMX source: RHEL5.vmx
Error: Failed to open file: J:\root\ISO\RHEL5U1_i386\RHEL5.1-Server-20071017.0-i386-disc3-ftp.iso
Completed with errors

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool RHEL5.vmx RHEL5.ovf
Opening VMX source: RHEL5.vmx
Error: Failed to open file: J:\root\ISO\RHEL5U1_i386\RHEL5.1-Server-20071017.0-i386-disc3-ftp.iso
Completed with errors

Anyone who knows how to fix this error?

Running OVF Tool 3.0.1 on 32 bit CentOS 6 Linux 2.6.32-279.11.1.el6.i686 (download from VMWare site md5sum was checked ok)

Tool starts up fine and is in the process of exporting a VM from one ESXi 4.1 host to another ESXi 4.1 host . 

Tool then crashes with /usr/bin/ovftool: line 23:  7629 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) "$OVFTOOL_BIN" "$@"

Hi- has anyone hit any problems with exporting large (e.g. > 1TB) VMs in OVA/OVF format?

I realise that you can split the files generated, but leaving aside any issues to do with the file-system on which the files reside, are there any inherent gotchas with the export mechanism or the file format that would mean it's not a good idea to rely on this for exporting large VMs...?

Thanks!

I am trying to convert a .ovf to a .vmx using the ovftool utility in terminal on OSX 10.6.8.

USING the --lax command, the result I get is as follows:

Any suggestions on how to fix this?  It seems to be a problem with ovftool itself?

HI,

I'm trying to create an OVF using ovftool 3.0.1. When I issue the ovftool command from the command line I get:

Error: cURL error: Couldn't connect to server
Completed with errors

I used the following command:

/usr/bin/ovftool vi://username:password@XX.XX.XX.XX/datacenter/vm/folder/vmname /destination

I can issue the command as above without the vmname to see if I can access Vsphere and to make sure I have a valid source locator.  The command is successful and returns a list of VMs I can use. When I add the VM name to the source locator path, I get the above error. The VM is pysically about 14GB in size (that is the space alloacted).

I can use the same command to another Vpshere server and I'm successful in creating the OVF. Which leads me to think that it might be a configuration issue with this Vsphere server?

What sorts of issues can lead to the above error?

Thanks,

Fernando

All,

First of all, apologies if this is an inappropriate forum. I do not have a support contact for this issue. We are VMware customers, however our licenses are purchased through an academic reseller. Our concern is that this bug has crept into recent releases and perhaps gone unnoticed in QA. It's serious enough for us to consider moving to other hypervisor products.

I believe there may be a serious bug in OVFtool's disk read code. We observe that VMs are created OK after upload or import, but disk contents are zero-filled. No error conditions are reported at any time. It is only clear that the bug has been exercised, when an uploaded or imported VM fails to boot.

We have several research VMs with multiple LANs, which run FreeBSD 8.2 in VMware Fusion 5.0.2, MacOS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion. I was also able to reproduce the bug with a fresh installation of vSphere ESXi 5.1 and ovftool 3.0.1. V

Using the separately packaged ovftool, I can export the VMs inside Fusion, by giving fully qualified paths to their VMX files. The bug appears to be in VMDK read. I exercised it in two use cases, Fusion OVA import and ESXi OVA upload, as follows:

1. If I import an affected OVA into Fusion from the GUI, Fusion will invoke its own copy of ovftool 3.0.1 to perform the import. VMs are created with a sane VMX file. VMDKs are created. However their contents are zero-filled, and the VMDK contents in the OVA have been ignored.
2. If I upload an affected OVA to ESXi, using ovftool and a vi:// target URL on the command line, the same bug is observed with ESXi. Again, the VMX is sane - we inspected this by SSHing into ESXi and manually reviewing the VMX on the VMFS data store with vi. The VMDK contents are zeroed on the VMFS datastore, and the VMDK contents in the OVA have been ignored.

ovftool seems, in some cases, to ignore the contents of the packaged VMDK files in OVAs, and those associated with VMX files from VMware products.

To date I have only been able to reproduce the issue with FreeBSD guests. The bug does not appear in all exported OVAs, however affected VM and OVA combinations will consistently demonstrate it.

• We first noticed this problem in October 2012, and have not been in a position to exercise it thoroughly until now.

• I can make an OVA available which demonstrates the issue. Please contact me privately to arrange. The files are typically 2GB in size.

Other observations:

• There is no problem with OVA generation. I have inspected the OVAs manually using tar, extracted the embedded VMDKs inside, converted them back to 2GB sparse format using vmware-vdiskmanager (or vmkfstools under ESXi), and loaded them into ESXi and Fusion respectively.

• Since ovftool was introduced, VMDKs must be uploaded manually using SFTP to avoid triggering the bug. The functionality in the vmware-vdiskmanager command which allows direct upload to ESXi servers has been removed.

• Casual inspection with DTrace under OS X reveals that ovftool seems to be reading the full OVA file contents. We initially thought there may been a problem with VMDK upload, however other guests have not been affected.

• The serialized format VMDK contents in the OVA are consistent with the original VMDKs. We verified this in one case with MD5 checksums. This requires denying all writes during the test.
• We also reproduced this bug with out-of-box, unmodified FreeBSD installations, as our research VMs use ZFS in GPT partition containers.

• We also noticed that Fusion's private copy of ovftool will break if ESXi specific options are specified in $HOME/.ovftool - although this is a separate issue from the main bug.
• No source code is supplied for ovftool, so users are not able to fix this issue themselves.

Workarounds:

• We load the OVA into Oracle VirtualBox, and re-export the OVA from there.
• This is undesirable for many reasons, the main one being that it loses all the network binding information, which is critical to our work.

thanks,

Bruce

I inserted eula file in ova file by ovftool command "eula@=[filename]".

But i dont know how to insert multi laguage eula.

How do I do that with the ovftool command?

I have an OVF I'm trying to import into VI (ESX 3.5) and I'm getting the following error:

Error: OVF Package is not supported by target:
- Line 57: No space left for device '7' on parent controller '6'.

Here's the snippet of OVF:

      <Item>
        <rasd:Address>0</rasd:Address>
        <rasd:ElementName>IDE 0</rasd:ElementName>
        <rasd:InstanceID>6</rasd:InstanceID>
        <rasd:ResourceSubType>piix4</rasd:ResourceSubType>
        <rasd:ResourceType>5</rasd:ResourceType>
      </Item>
      <Item>
        <rasd:AddressOnParent>0</rasd:AddressOnParent>
        <rasd:ElementName>Harddisk disk1</rasd:ElementName>
        <rasd:HostResource>ovf:/disk/disk1</rasd:HostResource>
        <rasd:InstanceID>7</rasd:InstanceID>
        <rasd:Parent>6</rasd:Parent>
        <rasd:ResourceType>17</rasd:ResourceType>
      </Item>
      <Item>
        <rasd:Address>1</rasd:Address>
        <rasd:ElementName>IDE 1</rasd:ElementName>
        <rasd:InstanceID>8</rasd:InstanceID>
        <rasd:ResourceSubType>piix4</rasd:ResourceSubType>
        <rasd:ResourceType>5</rasd:ResourceType>
      </Item>

Thanks!

Mike

Hello ,

I used the vcenter 4.1 console to Export OVF Template.  We need to be able to load this template in vmware player.  I downloaded ovftool and tried to convert the OVF template so that it could be run in Vmware player.

This is the command I am issuing to convert the template based off of the OVFTOOL PDF.  This, to my understanding should convert the OVF to a VMX and drop it in the D:\vms folder.  There are 4 disks in this VM server

Input

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool -tt=vmx D:\server_name\server_name.ovf D:\vms\

Output:

Opening OVF source: D:\server\server.ovf
The manifest validates
Opening VMX target: D:\vms\
Warning:
- Target does not support CPU validation.
Error:
-
Completed with errors

Needless to say the VMS folder is getting created but nothing else is being converted. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

DS

I'm trying to use the ovftool to import a OVA file into a ESXi server.  However I get the following error

Error: OVF Package is not supported by target:
- Line 118: Unsupported element 'Property'
Completed with errors

The related lines in the OVF file are:

    <ProductSection ovf:class="vami" ovf:instance="*******">
      <Info>Information about the installed software</Info>
      <Category>Networking Properties</Category>
118-->      <Property ovf:key="gateway" ovf:type="string" ovf:userConfigurable="true">
        <Label>Default Gateway</Label>
        <Description>The default gateway address for this VM. Leave blank if DHCP is desired.</Description>
      </Property>
      <Property ovf:key="DNS" ovf:type="string" ovf:userConfigurable="true">

Based on some initial investigation I have done I beleive this is because the ProductSection is defaulting to required="true" which forces ESXi to use these fields, however ESXi doesn't seem to support this and it errors out as shown above.

The OVA file was generated using ovftoolto export VM in a vcenter instance.  This OVA file imports fine into vcenter, but not ESXi

Is there anyway to configure ovftoolwhen run against vcenter to generate required="false" in the  ProductSection elements?

    <ProductSection ovf:class="vami" ovf:instance="*******" ovf:required="false">
   
Or some otherway to get ovftoolto export a VM from vcenter as an OVA that will import into ESXi?

ovftool 2.1, ESXi 4.1, vCenter 4.1

I'm trying to use ovftool to automate OVA deployments to vCloud Director 5.1. I have installed ovftool 3.0.1 on Ubuntu and tested out some operations. Everything seems to work except that I always get a segmentation fault when I invoke a vcloud target.

Here is the logging output:

2013-04-12T09:38:22.261-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] [SSL_DB] Using /home/evan/.ovftool.ssldb as SSL DB
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Subscribing to signal: 2 (SIGINT)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Subscribing to signal: 4 (SIGILL)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Subscribing to signal: 6 (SIGABRT)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Subscribing to signal: 8 (SIGFPE)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Subscribing to signal: 15 (SIGTERM)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Subscribing to signal: 1 (SIGHUP)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Subscribing to signal: 3 (SIGQUIT)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Subscribing to signal: 5 (SIGTRAP)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Subscribing to signal: 9 (SIGKILL)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Subscribing to signal: 13 (SIGPIPE)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] OvfTool Version: VMware ovftool 3.0.1 (build-801290)
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Using home directory: /home/evan/.ovftool
2013-04-12T09:38:22.263-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] OvfTool Environment:
--> /X:httpTimeout = "0"
--> /X:imageReadSize = "262144"
--> /X:logToConsole = "true"
--> /X:maxNumberOfTermSignals = "5"
--> /X:maxRedirects = "256"
--> /X:maximalDeltaConfSize = "8"
--> /X:maximalDeltaTreeSize = "6"
--> /X:progressSmoothing = "60"
--> /X:useMacNaming = "false"
--> /X:vCloudEnableGuestCustomization = "false"
--> /X:vCloudKeepTemplate = "true"
--> /X:vCloudTimeout = "3600"
--> /X:vimSessionTimeout = "600"
--> /authdPortSource = "902"
--> /authdPortTarget = "902"
--> /fencedMode = "bridged"
--> /prgPath = "/usr/lib/vmware-ovftool"
--> /source = "vcloud://vclouddirector.intapp.net/"
--> /vCloudTemplate = "false"
-->
2013-04-12T09:38:22.270-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Done initializing libs
2013-04-12T09:38:22.270-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Determining source
2013-04-12T09:38:22.270-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] Determining target
2013-04-12T09:38:22.302-07:00 [7F986BFFF700 verbose 'Default'] CURL: header data removed
2013-04-12T09:38:22.617-07:00 [7F986BFFF700 verbose 'Default'] CURL: header data removed
2013-04-12T09:38:22.617-07:00 [7F986BFFF700 verbose 'Default'] CURL: header data removed
2013-04-12T09:38:22.617-07:00 [7F986BFFF700 verbose 'Default'] CURL: header data removed
2013-04-12T09:38:22.617-07:00 [7F986BFFF700 verbose 'Default'] CURL: header data removed
2013-04-12T09:38:22.617-07:00 [7F986BFFF700 verbose 'Default'] CURL: header data removed
2013-04-12T09:38:22.617-07:00 [7F986BFFF700 verbose 'Default'] CURL: header data removed
2013-04-12T09:38:22.619-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] VCloud request body:
-->
2013-04-12T09:38:22.641-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] VCloud response body:
--> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
--> <SupportedVersions xmlns="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/versions" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/versionshttp://vclouddirector/api/versions/schema/versions.xsd">
-->     <VersionInfo>
-->         <Version>1.5</Version>
-->         <LoginUrl>https://vclouddirector.intapp.net/api/sessions</LoginUrl>
   ... schema output snipped ...
-->
2013-04-12T09:38:22.648-07:00 [7F987B01E740 verbose 'Default'] VCloud version used: 5.1

The end of the strace output:

[pid 15407] munmap(0x7f8b32f7c000, 135168) = 0
[pid 15407] munmap(0x7f8b32f9d000, 135168) = 0
[pid 15407] munmap(0x7f8b3cadb000, 135168) = 0
[pid 15407] write(6, "\25\3\1\0\30B& 2\7\30\3259W0n~(4\216\375\"\35\310c\211{+\350", 29) = 29
[pid 15407] close(6)                    = 0
[pid 15407] brk(0x2c17000)              = 0x2c17000
[pid 15407] brk(0x2c38000)              = 0x2c38000
[pid 15407] write(1, "2013-04-12T09:40:54.198-07:00 [7"..., 882013-04-12T09:40:54.198-07:00 [7F8B3CB7F740 verbose 'Default'] VCloud version used: 5.1
) = 88
[pid 15407] --- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) @ 0 (0) ---
Process 15404 resumed
Process 15407 detached
[pid 15410] +++ killed by SIGSEGV (core dumped) +++
[pid 15409] +++ killed by SIGSEGV (core dumped) +++
[pid 15408] +++ killed by SIGSEGV (core dumped) +++
[pid 15411] +++ killed by SIGSEGV (core dumped) +++
<... wait4 resumed> [{WIFSIGNALED(s) && WTERMSIG(s) == SIGSEGV && WCOREDUMP(s)}], 0, NULL) = 15407
write(2, "/usr/bin/ovftool: line 23: 15407"..., 91/usr/bin/ovftool: line 23: 15407 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) "$OVFTOOL_BIN" "$@"
) = 91
rt_sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, [], NULL, 8) = 0
--- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
wait4(-1, 0x7fff27453e98, WNOHANG, NULL) = -1 ECHILD (No child processes)
rt_sigreturn(0xffffffffffffffff)        = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGINT, {SIG_DFL, [], SA_RESTORER, 0x7f70fceb44a0}, {0x43f140, [], SA_RESTORER, 0x7f70fceb44a0}, 8) = 0
rt_sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, NULL, [], 8)  = 0
read(255, "", 409)                      = 0
exit_group(139)                         = ?

What is the difference between OVF 1.0 and 0.9 version? I would be interested in knowing about the major enchancements made in the newer versions and thereby the advantages of the same.

Thanks in advance

Hi,

I exported a VM from my ESXi 4.0.0 server using ovftool for Windows but the type of NIC seems to have been changed as part of the conversion. It was VMXNET3 on the host but ends up being VMXNET in the OVF.

The export was done as follows..

 ovftool --eula@=c:\MyEULA --powerOffSource vi://root:password@esxi4_host/MyVapp d:\dev\vapps\ 

Snippet from the original .vmx

ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet3"

Snippet from the .ovf that was generated

   <VirtualHardwareSection>
...snip..      <Item>        <rasd:AddressOnParent>7</rasd:AddressOnParent>        <rasd:AutomaticAllocation>true</rasd:AutomaticAllocation>        <rasd:Connection>VM Network</rasd:Connection>        <rasd:Description>VmxNet ethernet adapter on "VM Network"</rasd:Description>        <rasd:ElementName>ethernet0</rasd:ElementName>        <rasd:InstanceID>6</rasd:InstanceID>        <rasd:ResourceSubType>VmxNet</rasd:ResourceSubType>        <rasd:ResourceType>10</rasd:ResourceType>
...snip..    </VirtualHardwareSection>

Is this a known issue ? Any workarounds ?

I've been trying to import the ovf-based Oracle storage simulator to ESX4. Also tried importing to Workstation when that failed.

No luck. Not with integrated converter, not with standalone converter, not with ovftool. Changing/removing lines in .ovf file brings me a bit further but still no cigar.

The process stalls at different points, but typically I get an error about unknown OS or unsupported hardware, sometimes a parse error with no additional info.

Has anybody got this working?

The simulator is a virtual-box based Solaris appliance.

Ole Thomsen

Hi,

I am trying to deploy OVA using ovftool. I see the option --network and --net available for selecting the network by name, though I was not able to find a way to assign a static IP in the ovftool command itself. Something like --ip0=10.10.10.10. Is there a way we can do this? From UI when we deploy an OVA, we have provision to provide IP, Gateway, Netmask and DNS.

Thanks

Hi all,

I am trying to implement an OVF support for some virtualization software, which is using raw images for disks. I use qemu-img to convert raw images to vmdk format. Then I use ovftool to convert ovf file into vmware instance.

When the file I have is a simple ovf descriptor + manifest + disk - all is fine, it works even if I'm using qemu-img without "compat6" option

When the disk is compressed or the OVF package is packed into OVA - there are errors being thrown. Moreover when I create OVA package with no disk, the conversion works.

Here is the fragment of results for the OVA file:

Writing VMX file: test_ova.vmx
[2011-10-03 16:34:35.685 7F097D2C1720 verbose 'ovftool'] Using file size as progress measure
Disk progress: 0%[2011-10-03 16:34:35.685 7F097D2C1720 verbose 'ovftool'] Ovf::GetFileSource as StreamVmdk failed. Exception: Cannot open disk source: Not a supported disk format (sparse VMDK version too old)
Disk Transfer Failed                      
Error: Failed to open source disk: 3f66f54d-a9fa-4aa8-806d-d757d6f34a59.disk0.vmdk
[2011-10-03 16:34:35.685 7F097D2C1720 verbose 'ovftool'] Backtrace:
[00] rip 00007f09767453e4 
[01] rip 00007f09765e99d4 
[02] rip 00007f097658e038 
[03] rip 00000000004fef51 
[04] rip 000000000054aaa5 
[05] rip 000000000054ae78 
[06] rip 000000000049c41a 
[07] rip 00007f0974e62c4d 
[08] rip 000000000047ec7a 

[2011-10-03 16:34:35.685 7F097D2C1720 verbose 'ovftool'] Deleting file: ./test_ova-disk1.vmdk

Same fragment when I unpack OVA and then run ovftool on the .ovf file:

Writing VMX file: test_ovf.vmx
[2011-10-03 16:35:53.934 7F7E899C4720 verbose 'ovftool'] Using file size as progress measure
Disk progress: 0%[2011-10-03 16:35:53.935 7F7E899C4720 verbose 'ovftool'] Ovf::GetFileSource as StreamVmdk failed. Exception: Cannot open disk source: Not a supported disk format (sparse VMDK version too old)
Disk progress: 99%[2011-10-03 16:35:54.106 7F7E899C4720 verbose 'ovftool'] Ovf::GetFileSource: Opened 3f66f54d-a9fa-4aa8-806d-d757d6f34a59.disk0.vmdk as diskLib source
[2011-10-03 16:35:54.106 7F7E899C4720 verbose 'ovftool'] Opening disk target /xcinstall-1.corp.google.com/VirtualLsiLogicController0:0
Disk Transfer Completed                   
Completed successfully

Thank you.

I have a .ova created supplied to me that I'd like to open on several local copies of VMWare Workstation.

On one machine I am able to open it successfully.

On another using VMWare Workstation I get warnings that the .ova "did not pass OVF specification conformance or virtual hardware compliance checks" and then if I attempt to retry, I get an "Invalid access to memory location."

This is using VMWare Workstation 8.0.0 build-471780 on a Windows 7 Pro 64-bit 6.1.7601, SP 1 machine.

Attempting it with the latest build of OVFtool (2.1.0 build-461994) also fails.

Here's the output of ovftool.exe to the console - suggestions/ideas welcome!

I recently had an issue where I exported a VM as an OVF using the vSphere client, a few weeks later I needed to import the VM back into our environment and after importing I received an "Error loading Operating System" error.  I have imported and exported countless VMs as OVF files, and this is very frustrating.  I also have VMs sent to me from Government entities and I always express how they should send them as an OVF file since it makes it very easy for me to import.  Recently I had 1 out of 3 errors after the import with the same "Error loading Operating System" message.

I have tried to change the HD controller on the VM, I also created a New VM with the "custom" option and I chose the exact OS and vHardware for the VM, and I tried to use the existing .vmdk files and that does not work.  I'm just wondering if there is some simple fix out there for what I thought was a simple import and export.

I'm using ESXi 4.1 Update 2 on HP BL hardware...oh, I also have VMware Workstation 8, and I can mount the vmdk files.

Hi,

I have an OVF file that refeneces a disk image from a webserver, e.g.:

<File ovf:href="http://myserver/cdrom.iso" ovf:id="file1"/>

When i try to deploy this OVF to a vSphere server, it fails at the disk transfer stage... it looks to me like ovftool is treating it like a local file:

$ ovftool my.ovf vi://root:@172.26.0.172

Opening OVF source: my.ovf

Warning: No manifest file

Opening VI target: vi://root@172.26.0.172:443/

Deploying to VI: vi://root@172.26.0.172:443/

Disk Transfer Failed

Error: Failed to open file: cdrom.iso

Here is the output with logging enabled:

When an OVF is deployed from a local file, does it mean the references also need to be local? I had a quick read of the OVF spec and it seems like file reference can be anywhere... local, relative, http or https... any ideas?