Hi all,

I need to automate the process of creating a vm with the (centos)kickstart file spcified, 

i was able to do this in xen, where in the commandline prams i specified the centos5 iso to boot from and gave boot paramaters so xen picked up the parameters and started the kickstart installation.

how do i do such similar process with vmware vsphere/ vcenter ?

thanks,

Saravanan Sundaramoorthy

I'm getting wildly different results while importing large OVF file into vCloud Director 1.0.1 via the ovftool than when performing the upload of the same OVF via the native JAva tool within vCloud Director itself. AS long as the file transfer compeltes through the vCD Java tool, the file is importing into vCenter correctly, and then being correctly registered within vCD.

The OVF I'm working with is 68.2 GB in size.

Below is a sanatized version of my command line and the output from the tool:

ovftool --net:"dvportgroup-48=company-Services_Internal" E:\OlioWebtest\oliowebtest.ovf "vcloud://user:password@testvcd1.company.com:443/?org=company_Services&vapp=OlioWebTest&vdc=company_Services_ALLO_vDC01&catalog=test"
Opening OVF source: E:\OlioWebtest\oliowebtest.ovf
The manifest validates
Warning: File is not referred in the manifest: oliowebtest.ovf
Opening vCloud target: vcloud://user@testvcd1.company.com:443/
Waiting for task on server .done
Deploying to vCloud: vcloud://user@testvcd1.company.com:443/
Disk Transfer Completed

Error: Invalid response from server
Completed with errors

Looking in the vCD GUI logs for the organization, I see the descriptor being processed, and the process for finalizing the upload completing, but the vApp is never added to the catalog. If I look in vCenter, I can find the VM on a valdi datastore for the org vDC and the correct resource pool in the proper state for a catalog vApp. The error "Error: Invalid response from server" is displayed immediately upon completion of the data transfer.

If I move the VM to the root of the datacenter, I can import the VM as a vApp and copy it to the caalog with no issue.

I tested with a much smaller OVF (1.3 GB), and received exactly the behavior I expected.

ovftool --net:"none=company-Services_Internal" E:\suse\descriptor.ovf "vcloud://user:password@testvcd1.company.com:443/?org=company_Services&vapp=SUSE32&vdc=company_Services_ALLO_vDC01&catalog=test"
Opening OVF source: E:\suse\descriptor.ovf
Warning: No manifest file
Opening vCloud target: vcloud://user@testvcd1.company.com:443/
Waiting for task on server .done
Deploying to vCloud: vcloud://user@testvcd1.company.com:443/
Disk Transfer Completed

Waiting for task on server ...................done
Waiting for task on server .......................................done
Waiting for task on server ..done
Completed successfully

Looking at the succesful transfer, I see an additonal action logged in the GUI logs for the organization. After the finalization record, there is a "Create virtual application" event logged on the smaller transfer that is never logged on the larger transfer.

The only item I can think of from a vCloud Director standpoint is that that vCD logon sesion timeout has expired on the large transfer long before the additional tasks are issued to vCD resulting in the invalid response. Is this the case, or is something else going on?

When looking at the vcloud-container-info.log file on the cells doing the processing for the succesful imports, I see a whole string of commands being executed in the current logged on user context.

Experts,

I downloaded and installed VMware OVF Tool i am running Vmware Workstation 9. I am trying to figure out how to use VMware OVF Tool and create my VMs. Any help with this ?

Regards,

SD

Hi All,

Everytime I manually export a VM using vsphere client, I am getting the resultant ovf of much larger size. ( i.e. size of .vmdk's are much larger, increases by 10% everytime )
I looked at various temporary files and log files and deleted them before taking the ovf, but it also doesnt reduces the size significantly.
My vm doesnt do any huge IO on the disks.

Is there a best practice for exporting an ovf .? ( Ex. SLES based vms. )

Thanks

Nikunj

It appears that ovftool 3.0.1 has an issue while specifying the target datastore when importing an OVF when the VI is a vCenter 5.0 server with ESX 5.0 Update 1 hosts that have a large number of Datastores.  The cluster where this problem occurs has 148 Datastores.

Some datastores work, most don't.  This is a new problem since ovftool 2.0.1 worked fine when this cluster was at ESX 4.0 Update 3.

An example statement that will cause the problem (with all names replaced with "test" names):

"C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool\ovftool.exe" --acceptAllEulas --name="TestVM" --datastore="TestDatastore" --network=TestNetwork --vmFolder="TestFolder" http://192.168.0.1/public/ovfs/testvm.ovf vi://"username:password"@vcenter.test.com/"Data Center"/host/"HA and DRS"/Resources/"Test Resource Pool"

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

Hello:

I am working in a Windows environment with ovftool 3.01.

When running the ovftool in a directory that contains an ovf and a .ovftool file, the ovftool does not seem to pick up the local configuration file.

> ovftool --help config

This will show as "Currently no local configuration options in .ovftool"

I have tried a number of permutations: ".ovftool", "<name>.ovftool", even "ovftool.cfg" on the off chance it is looking for the global name.

But none of these options work.

When I move the file to C:\Documents and Settings\$USERNAME\VMware\ovftool.cfg, which makes it global, it works just fine. So, I know the file is working.

But I am managing dozens of unique OVAs, and so having the local configuration option would be most helpful.

Am I misnaming the local config? Or is this a known bug or linux-only feature?

Thanks,

Andrew

I have an OVA that have built and deployed via VIC many times successfully.  I am now trying to automate the deployment via the OVFTOOL.  However, I keep seeing this "transfer failed" message.  Is there some way to enable a more verbose output?

Here is my current command/output:

ovftool --acceptAllEulas --datastore=dsRTPPOC1 --network="VM Network" z:\Jazzsm\IBM_Jazz_for_Service_Management___v1_1___Sprint_23.ova vi://admin:password@rtpvcpoc1.tivlab.raleigh.ibm.com/ZoneM/host/ZoneM/rtpesxpoc1.tivlab.raleigh.ibm.com/
Opening OVA source: z:\Jazzsm\IBM_Jazz_for_Service_Management___v1_1___Sprint_23.ova
Opening VI target: vi://admin@rtpvcpoc1.tivlab.raleigh.ibm.com:443/ZoneM/host/ZoneM/rtpesxpoc1.tivlab.raleigh.ibm.com/
Warning:
- The specified operating system identifier 'RedHat Enterprise Linux Server 6.2' (id: 80) is not supported on the selected host. It will be mapped to the following OS identifier: 'Other Linux (64-bit)'.
Deploying to VI: vi://labadmin@rtpvcpoc1.tivlab.raleigh.ibm.com:443/ZoneM/host/ZoneM/rtpesxpoc1.tivlab.raleigh.ibm.com/
Transfer Failed
Error: System error: (Unknown exception)
Completed with errors

I am trying to deploy OVAs using ovftool 3.0.1 to an ESXi 5.1 host. When deploying VCSA 5.1.0b it works as expected with the following command:

I have confirmed that I can deploy the OVA manually. I have also confirmed the MD5SUM and tried the --disableVerification flag on ovftool. Any idea what I am missing?

Hi,

We have been trying to create the monolithicSparse Image for the Vapp Ovf using the following OVF Tool command-Line Options

/usr/bin/ovftool --acceptAllEulas -dm=monolithicSparse Test_Vapp.ovf NEW_Vapp.vmdk

But the Ovf tool fails to do the conversion with the following message

Error: OVF Package is not supported by target.

We have also tried validating the Vapp ovf file using the ovftool schemaValidate and did not find any issues with this.

Please let us know if the Ovf tool supports conversion for multiple virtual machines (i.e support for Vapp OVF)

Thanks in advance

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

Hi!

I'm trying to to deploy a OVF/OVA file into my vCenter but I'm getting a error message, pls help me.

"Line 61: No space left for device '5' on parent controller '4'."

(Tested to deploy other templates and it worked fine)

Any idea anyone?

Hello

When using ovftool:

# ovftool file.ova file

Opening OVA source: file.ova

The manifest validates

Opening VMX target: file

Error: OVF Package is not supported by target:

- Line 60: OVF hardware element 'ResourceType' with instance ID '3': No support for the virtual hardware device type '7'.

Completed with errors

When trying to deploy ova via vCenter i got similar error:

Details: Line 60: OVF hardware element Resource Type with instance ID 3. No support for the virtual hardware device type 7.

When looking at the xml file i can see that device type 7 is related to the following:

<rasd:Address>1</rasd:Address>

<rasd:Description>VIRTIO Controller</rasd:Description>

<rasd:ElementName>VIRTIOController 0</rasd:ElementName>

<rasd:InstanceID>3</rasd:InstanceID>

<rasd:ResourceType>7</rasd:ResourceType>

How can i make it working ?

Is there any way to exclude that element from ova file ?

Thanks,

Michal

     We are getting null response (No error) when create the vm without datacenter params..

Hi VMWare experts,

I am having problem with automation script because the string passed in the ovftool command uses credential vsphere.local\userXYZ instead of just userXYZ

It appears that the backsplash in the 'vsphere.local\user' cause the command line to be misinterpreted, so the automation script that calls ovftool to deploy VMs kept failing.  It erred with "cURL error of ‘couldn’t resolve hostname" even though there is nothing wrong with any hosts or hostname resolution on the network.

On a Win-based vCenter I was able to reconfigure it so that instead of requiring login user format of 'vsphere.local\userXYZ', it will now accept user = 'userXYZ'. 

With that change, ovftool.exe command string is now progress correctly and VMs are deployed. 

I could reconfigure Window-based vCenter to not use just user = userXYZ (instead of vsphere.local\account), but I could not figure out how to get vCSA to stop requiring the format of vsphere.local\userXYZ.

The string segment in the long ovftool.exe command line looked like this …

This works:

"vi://userXYZ:password@tm-vcenter55/DC2-SJ/host/Topology/csg-sj-esxi112.cisco.com"

This does not work:

"vi://vsphere.local\userXYZ:password@lin-vcenter55/DC2-SJ/host/Topology/csg-sj-esxi111.cisco.com"

Is there anyway to configure vCenter Virtual Appliance to use log in format of user = userXYZ instead of user = vsphere.local\userXYZ?   Or is there some way of reformatting the string so that OS can interpret it correctly even with backsplash '\' is used in the string?

Thank you

Charles

The complete ovftool.exe command is shown below:

"C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool\ovftool.exe" --acceptAllEulas --skipManifestCheck --diskMode=thin --name=linsys2-vm1 --deploymentOption=vm_typeA --datastore=EMC-LUN1 --net:"Network Adapter 1"="VLAN 410 - 172.27.14.0/24" --net:"Network Adapter 2"="VLAN 410 - 172.27.14.0/24" --vmFolder=   --prop:cisco_hostname.Proj=linsys2-vm1 --prop:cisco_ip_0.Proj=172.27.14.135 --prop:cisco_dnsDomain.Proj=cisco.com --prop:cisco_netmask_0.Proj=255.255.255.0 --prop:cisco_gateway_0.Proj=172.27.14.1 --prop:cisco_dns1_0.Proj=172.27.200.199 --prop:cisco_dns2_0.Proj=173.36.131.10 --prop:cisco_language.Proj=English v:\ova\projectX_1.0.0.ova "vi://vsphere.local\userXYZ:password@lin-vcenter55/DC2-SJ/host/Topology/csg-sj-esxi111.cisco.com"

Opening OVA source: v:\ova\projectX_1.0.0.ova

The manifest does not validate

Error: cURL error: Couldn't resolve host name

Completed with errors

Installation Done!

Using a seperate process (python-vm-builder), I am building an ESX/ESXi compliant image that I have confirmed can be uploaded, imported and started in Workstation, ESX 3.0, ESXi 3.5 and even Server 2.0+.

I'm trying to go into the next step now, and convert this ESXi Image into a single OVF archive for even easier deployments.

Using the latest OVF Tool I have successfully created the new .ovf and zipped it up inside a tar.gz'd.  On my Windows box, I then extract it (using WinRAR), then using 'Import' in VIC try to import it.  When I select the OVF and click next it then throws the below error:

An error occurred while parsing the OVF descriptor

Unable to parse XML element 'Envelope'

What am I doing wrong? 

I have attached both the original VMX and the new OVF.

Please help!

Thank you.

Hi All,

    I have just exported an vApp using ovf from my vCenter v4u2. When I try to import into Vmware Workstation 7.1(running on Window 7 Ent 64bit) I get the following error message "The OVF descriptor file could not be parsed."  I have attached the log.

Cheers!

hello.

         I create a ova file from my ESXi 5.0.0 with ovftool 2.1.0-467744, then I deploy this ova file into ESXi 5.0.0 is success and work well.

But I can't deploy the same ova file into VMWare Player with ovftool 2.1.0-467744 installed. Why?

         Anybody has any idea? Thanks.

Best Regards,

Hello..

Is it possible to give vCenter appliance ip, gateway, netmask etc via ovftool? Same way as to Orchestrator.

--prop:vami.DNS.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=10.0.0.69  --prop:vami.gateway.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=10.0.0.1  --prop:vami.ip0.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=10.0.0.96  --prop:vami.netmask0.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=255.255.255.0

When running these commands with ovftool, it doesnt give any errors  or anything, but it doesnt pass the variables forward either. Clearly  vCenter appliance doesnt have any "intelligence" for such feature.

ovftool --acceptAllEulas --skipManifestCheck  --datastore=storage-1 --diskMode=thin --name=vcenter --prop:vami.DNS.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=10.0.0.69   --prop:vami.gateway.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=10.0.0.1   --prop:vami.ip0.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=10.0.0.96   --prop:vami.netmask0.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=255.255.255.0

/VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.0.0.3324-472350/VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.0.0.3324-472350_OVF10.ovf.backup  vi://10.0.0.10

So any tips? Do I need to create some external media and modify the appliance to add it in, which will pass the needed variables to appliance, and script which will run from init.d on start and read those?

-k-