Tried to install 64bit ovftool on VMware vMA 4.0 today and it failed to install or yield any useful information:

[vi-admin@scofield]$ ./VMware-ovftool-installer-1.0.0-166674-lin.x86_64.sh

VMware OVF Tool installer script
Copyright VMware 2009
.........extracting archive........

Checksum validation failed for archive.
(If you use FTP, make sure to set it to binary mode)

As far as I can tell, the binary is actually included in the install script though I'm not sure why 'FTP' is being referenced here unless VMware is expecting to download the actual source? I would hope that since vMA is a VMware virtual appliance that it should support any "VMwae" utilities but from what I've seen in the past with VDDK and VIX, that is not always and generally is not the case.

Can anyone comment on or know how to get it to install?

Thanks for your time

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009

VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at: http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/

Twitter: @lamw

vGhetto Script Repository

Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)

Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

VMware Developer Community

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

I want to set some properties to ovf files.

I use ovftool as bellow:

ovftool --prop:ip=10.32.23.123 --prop:dns=255.255.254.0

when this command has been executed without error showing, I still cannot see the property of ovf files.

Then I used ovftool myovffile.ovf

I still can not see the property I want to set.

what should I do?

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 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?

I give; I have spent too long attempting to find the magic decoder ring to get ovftool to do what I expect to be a very basic use case.

My vCenter server is win2k8 R2 node, my host node is RHEL6.3, and my guest in this case is CentOS6.3.

The vCenter server FQDN is vsphere2.foo.com.

The ESX host is las13.foo.com.

The guest is qavm1.foo.com

The Datacenter name is screwy, but appears to be passable with URI character replacements.  The name is "Foo / Bar Network" so I have been using "Foo %2f Bar Network" and quoting any URL string to deal with the spaces.

Examining the Datacenter layout in vCenter client, the path to the vm from which I want to create an OVA is

Foo / Bar Network/QA Guy/las13.foo.com/qavm1

attempting to use ovftool from either the Win2k8 server or my RHEL6.4 development machine results in the same errors.  I have perturbed the syntax of options and paths in so many ways I don't want to list them all here, but the end result is always an incorrect reference or missing object.

Might I grovel for the proper syntax to store a VM guest as an OVA?

Yes...I have devoured the manual mutiple times over...RTFM is my first tenet

Thank you all!

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourcetype=vmx "vi://administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com"

Error: Unknown option: 'sourcetype'

Completed with errors

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourceType=vmx "vi://administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com"

Error: Failed to open file: vi://administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourceType=vmx "vi://administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com/qavm1"

Error: Failed to open file: vi://administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com/qavm1

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourceType=VI "vi://administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com/qavm1"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: administrator

Password: **********

Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://administrator@vsphere2.foo.com:443/Foo / Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com/qavm1

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourceType=VI "vi://administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: administrator

Password: *********

Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://administrator@vsphere2.foo.com:443/Foo / Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourceType=VI "vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/host/"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: Administrator

Password: **********

Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com:443/Foo / Bar Network/host/

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourceType=VI "vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/host"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: Administrator

Password: **********

Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com:443/Foo / Bar Network/host

[root@qavm34 tmp]#

[root@qavm34 tmp]#

[root@qavm34 tmp]#

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourceType=VI "vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: Administrator

Password: **********

Error: Found wrong kind of object (Datacenter). Possible completions are:

  vm/

  host/

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourceType=VI "vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/vm/qavm1"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: Administrator

Password: **********

Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com:443/Foo / Bar Network/vm/qavm1

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourceType=VI "vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/vm/QA Guy/qavm1"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: Administrator

Password: **********

Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com:443/Foo / Bar Network/vm/QA Guy/qavm1

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --sourceType=VI "vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com?moref=vim.vm.VirtualMachine:qavm1"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: Administrator

Password: **********

Error: Invalid object type specified (not a ManagedEntity subtype)

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool "vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com?moref=vim.vm.VirtualMachine:qavm1"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: Administrator

Password: **********

Error: Invalid object type specified (not a ManagedEntity subtype)

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool "vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: Administrator

Password: **********

Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com:443/Foo / Bar Network/host/las13.foo.com

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool "vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com/Foo %2f Bar Network?ds=[EqualLogic] qavm1/qavm1.vmx"

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: Administrator

Password: *********

Please enter login information for source vi://vsphere2.foo.com/

Username: Administrator

Password: **********

Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://Administrator@vsphere2.foo.com:443/Foo %2f Bar Network?ds=[EqualLogic]%20qavm1/qavm1.vmx

[root@qavm34 tmp]# ovftool --version

VMware ovftool 3.0.1 (build-801290)

[root@qavm34 tmp]#

I'm trying to import an OVA file with settable OVF properties for configuration (product key, network configuration) into vCloud with ovftool. It seems from the documentation that I should be using the --prop option to set these values, but they don't seem to get passed through vCloud to the deployed vApp, and the system gives an error about unconfigured properties when it tries to start up. I can go in the vCloud interface and manually enter them for my vApp, but I was hoping to automate the process with ovftool.

At first I thought the issue was that the properties where at the VM level instead of the vApp level, but changing the OVA in vSphere to move the properties to the vApp itself produces the same result. Using the same command to import the OVA directly into vSphere correctly sets the properties with either version.

Is setting of OVF properties for vCloud supported by ovftool? If so, what is the correct syntax?

Currently running:

ovftool -o --acceptAllEulas --prop:productkey="XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX" --prop:ipaddress="10.146.3.1" --prop:netmask="255.255.0.0" --prop:gateway="10.146.1.254" vApp.ova vcloud://vclouddirector?org=IT&vdc=IT&catalog=IT&vapp=test1

Thanks.

I am trying to convent a vmx within vCenter server to a local vmx, i am trying with:

ovftool.exe "vi://user:password@my_vCenterserver/may_datacenter?ds=[my_datastore] my_vm/my_vm.vmx" C:\ovfs\my_vm.vmx

as the tool user guide Page 35, session "Converting a VM on ESXi or vCenter to an OVF" introduces.

But I got prompt as:

Opening VI source: vi://my_vCenterserver:443/

Error: Datacenter object not found

Completed with errors

But, i am sure the my_datacenter is INDEED exists.

Any suggestions what should i do?

Additional:

I even can NOT probe my VMX like this:

ovftool.exe vi://user:password@my_vCenterserver/my_datacenter/my_vm/my_vm.vmx

with Error:

Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://user:password@my_vCenterserver/my_datacenter/my_vm/my_vm.vmx

But I am very sure 'my_vmx' locates indeed there.

Hello, I have been using VMWare for some time now, but new to this conversion tool and vCloud.


My current dilemma is getting a VMWare player VMX converted so I can upload it to vCloud. Seemed straightforward, but every time I convert it and then try to upload it to vCloud, I get 


a virtual system in the ovf file being uploaded requires unrecognized virtual hardware version


I have other platforms to move from as well- I hope this forum will get me where I need to be with those instances, but this error doesn't show when I search the forum. I assume that either I need a switch in there when running ovftool, or you simply can't convert a Player file into an OVF. I am testing the stand-alone convertor, stepping the output file down to VMX-9 to see if this will help.


...I notice there are a lot of questions about getting from one platform and format to another.


Is there no chart somewhere with all of this info in it? That is, FROM platform on X axis, TO platform on Y axis, Yes/no/details/link to more info/etc in cells as appropriate? I was not able to find one.

     Seems like we could use that... I have a very light team running the vCloud and they just aren't there for me with the conversion work I need to do- and that work is essentially all I need to do on the maintenance side of the fence. Plowing through all of the manuals and becoming an expert in what I need to do is also not an option...

I'm deploying OVA files to a vCenter using ovftool; it's working perfectly, but I want to go the extra mile and automatically set the hostname of the VM after it is deployed.

I found a reference to a 'hostname' property (--prop:hostname=myvm.example.com), but it doesn't actually work

Here's my command  line

ovftool --lax --acceptAllEulas --datastore=MySAN --overwrite --powerOn --vmFolder=TestFolder --diskMode=thin --powerOffTarget --prop:hostname=myvm.example.comhttp://myurl.com/path/input.ova vi://vcenteruser:password@mycenter.example.com/MyDC/host/MyD/Resources/OVFTest

So what is the proper way to do this?

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

Hey,

Is anybody aware of what network flows exist when deploying an ovf file using ovftool through a vCenter?  Right now ovftool is continually erroring out with the following message:

Transfer Failed                      
Error: Network connection was lost.
Completed with errors

When watching on the vCenter I can see that the virtual machine is created but then it looks like data is never actually transferred.  So I know that the initial connection to vCenter is successful.

I'm guessing the initial connection happens with vCenter and then the data transfer occurs directly with the ESX.  Would be very appreciative if somebody could confirm this and identify the port that the data transfer happens on.

Thanks,

-Chris

Hi all,

I have a VirtualBox OVA file that I'd like to convert to vSphere with vmxnet3 driver.

I've ran my VBOX OVA file against ovftool with --lax option to avoid the "unknown hardware virtualbox-2.2" issue which produces VMX and VMDISK file.

Is there a way for OVFTOOL to change the network adapter to use vmxnet3 as opposed to "just open the VMX file and edit virtualDev section"?

Thanks,

Ed

We have a specific folder used for certain vm's that I need to deploy to.


As an example I can view the current list of vm's with:


ovftool vi://myadmin:mypass@ourvcenter/DATACENTER/vm/myvms

Error: Found wrong kind of object (Folder). Possible completions are:
vmname1
vmname2
vmname3
　


Now let’s say I want to import an ovf to myvms/vmname4 I get a "Locator does not refer to an object" error.


ovftool --datastore=mydatastore --network=mynetwork vi://myadmin:mypass@ourvcenter/DATACENTER/vm/myvms/vmname4 newvm.ovf

Opening VI source: vi://myadmin:mypass@ourvcenter/DATACENTER/vm/myvms/vmname4
Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://myadmin:mypass@ourvcenter/DATACENTER/vm/myvms/vmname4
Completed with errors


I have tried variations of using —name and —vmfolder and changing the vi: path without success.


I can import directly to esxi and to host through vcenter but we are then having to go back into vcenter to move these vms to the correct folder.


Is there a way to get this into the "right" place up front?

Rene posted a nice blog entry about using ovftool to deploy an OVA.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vapp/2009/07/commandline-ovf-deployments-.html

eske

When moving VMs from RHEV, KVM, Hyper-V, and VMware, which many are doing today, OVF makes sense as a starting point, however, OVF is very ineffecient if the given VMs already have virtual disks in the correct location.  For example, moving VMs from VMware to KVM, and from KVM to VMware, since KVM supports VMDK as does VMware, and both could and can access the same datastore/NFS mount point, the encode/decode of the virtual machine disks in OVF is not needed, just use a reference path to the VM disks, not the actual data.  So the question is, When will OVF support disk reference paths and not embed disk data into mgiration file?  Interesting feature no?

Hi I'm wondering if there is an automation tool/command(s) that will allow us (team of developers) to import/use a .iso file that contains 64bit OS and pass it through VMware ESXi or Server and then export it to OVF/OVA?

Is it possible? Can it be done?

Your answers will be very apreciated, many thanks!

Hi All.

VMware OVF Tool 2.1.0 is now ready for download.

Go to the download link on the frontpage.

Eske

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 All,

I have just come across ovftool and was giving a try to it. I am fairly new to VMware world.

I have a  .OVF which I exported using vSphere client 4.0. This .OVF comprises of 3 Suse Linux based virtual machines. i.e. I created a vApp on ESX (4.1) host, in this vApp I put my 3 SLES VMs and then exported it as OVF.

It has a total size of around 4.5GB.

Now I ran this command to compress this .OVF as well as gave an option to create deltadisks.

C:\> ovftool --compress=9 --makeDeltaDisks --skipManifestCheck  MyVMCluster\MyVMCluster.ovf   E:\

output:

{{{

The manifest does not validate
Generating delta disks for 2 disks (capacity 40960 MB)
Reading disks
Disk Transfer Completed

Determining optimal configuration for capacity group
Writing configuration to disk
Disk Transfer Completed

Completed successfully

}}}

Now when I checked my E:\ It had created a folder with the same name and put related files there. I saw a significant reduction in the new vmdk size. ( around 2.3GB now )

Now when I manually deploy this new ovf on vSphere client, it goes till certain %age and then flags an error:

{{{

Error uploading file to server ( E:\MyVMCluster\disk3.vmdk.gz ) Not a supported disk format ( Invalid sparse vmdk header )

}}}

and then it stops and everything rolledback.

Any pointers ?

Thanks

Nikunj

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.