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

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,

Hi All,

I just started exploring the ovf-tools. I have an ovf template available for a VM and I was able to deploy it in Workstation using the GUI.

Is there a way / command available to use this pre-existing .ovf template and deploy a Virtual Machine in workstation using this; through ovf-tool?

Any help would be appreciated.

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?

Hi,

I have a ESXi 5.0 server running which has a Guest VM running CentOS 5.6.

The ESXi server is a standalone server, not included in a datacenter, not managed by vCenter.

The server has a HDD of 80G which has both the ESXi host & the Guest OS running on top of it.

I installed ovftools on my Windows laptop & tried to create a ovf from the VM but am unsuccessful. I constantly get the following error -

c:\>ovftool vi://root:<rootpassword>@<ESXi Host IP>/datastore1/CentOS c:\testVM.ovf

Error: Cannot parse locater: vi://root:<rootpassword>@<ESXi Host IP>/datastore1/CentOS

Completed with errors

The local datastore name is "datastore1"

Can someone help me out here with forming the correct the ovftool command to create an ovf & possibly an OVA out of the running VM?

Thanks

Bhushan Pathak

I'm using the ovf tool to convert a virtual appliance to virtual machine format and getting a memory size limitation error based on the OVF source.  The source ovf file specifies 4GB of memory for guest OS:

Error:

- Virtual machine has 4,096 megabytes of memory, which is outside the range of 4 to 3,600 megabytes supported on the host.  This may be a general limitation of the host software, or specific to the guest OS selected for the virtual machine.

The work around is to edit the source ovf file and decrease the RAM size to  3 GB and conversion works fine.  But I'm curious why this limitation is occuring.  Is 3,600 MB the maximum virtual memory size supported byVMware workstation or server?

I am trying to import OVF with custom propery set and getting folling error with vmware ovf tool. Any idea on how to resolve this issue?

Error:

- Line 107: Unsupported element 'Property'

I have exported an VM to an ovf and put it in a folder on a 2003 windows server.  I then created a web folder in IIS 6, and turned on folder browsing.  When I put the url path in vSphere to import the ovf, I get a 404 error from IIS.  Is there a way to publish an ovf to IIS6? 

Thanks in advance,

geob

Hi,

I am using the ovftool v2.0.1 64bit to automatically create the OVA files from the virtual machines created by the workstation 7.1 and have two big problems:

• The ovftool don't know the gestos = "windows7-64" in the vmx file.
  • It encode it to <OperatingSystemSection ovf:id="1" vmw:osType="*winVista64Guest">.
  • Using the ovftool to create the virtual machine from this ova package create vmx file with guestos = "other" (32bit OS). The virtual machine doesn't work before the OS type is not changed to the 64bit win7
  • Using the guestos = "winvista-64" in vmx file is the workaround but I want to see support for win7 x64bit OS, please.
• Using the ovftool with mapped network discs on Win7 is nightmare when encoding or decoding the OVA file with compress option. The speed is about 1MB/s when the target is on mapped network disk. Tested in more environment with same results.
  The virtual drive size before compression (vmdk file) is about 12GB and the size after compression is about 5-6GB (ova package).
  The OS installed in virtual drive is Win7 64b.
  I am using parameter "--compression=9" when creating the ova package.

Do you have any solution for these problems. especially for the second one, please?

Was giving an SSL error, now giving a connecgt error. No firewall involved. I wonder Windows does not have ssh, so, why is vConverter using ssh.

Any help much appreciated.

Hi,

I am trying to convert <http://download.oracle.com/otn/other/servers-storage/storage/open-storage/sunstorage7000/SunStorageVBox.zip> into a format that VMware could use. I tried the latest version of the VMware OVF Tool but it fails. Neither using the settings "--lax" helps nor does converting the virtual machine to OVF version 0.9 (via VirtualBox' im- and export functions).

Does anyone know how I could run this simulator within VMware?

Best regards!

Not sure if I'm not getting the syntax correct, but I am attempting to export a vm in OVF format directly from a ESXi 4.1 host.

I have tried several different commands, but all have failed.

Any help with the Syntax to export the OVF directly from a Host would be greatly apprecaited.

ovftool --compress=9 "vi://host1/ha-datacenter/3PAR-LUN6/server1" "Z:\server1.ovf"

ovftool --compress=9  "vi://host1/DC1/3PAR-LUN6/server1/server1.vmx" "Z:\server1.ovf"

ovftool --compress=9  "https://host1/DC1/server1/server1.vmx" "Z:\server1.ovf"

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

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]#

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'm trying to create an additional property in my VM that I build with VMware Studio so that I can use OVFTool to pass a value for the property when I deploy the VM to a vCenter.

The property looks like that shown in red.  But when I invoke OVFTool to give a value to this property, what am I supposed to be using? 

Something like this I can't get to work:

    ovftool  <...>  --prop.ConfigurationManagementServer.My_VM_Name= 10.1.2.3   <..>

Thanks for any hints,

CJ

        <Section xsi:type="vadk:IpAssignmentSection_Type">

                <Info>Supported IP assignment schemes</Info>

                <vmw:IpAssignmentSection ovf:required="false" vmw:protocols="IPv4,IPv6" vmw:schemes="">

                        <Info>Supported IP assignment schemes</Info>

                </vmw:IpAssignmentSection>

        </Section>

        <Section xsi:type="vadk:PropertySection_Type">

                <Info/>

                <Property ovf:key="ConfigurationManagementServer" ovf:type="string" ovf:userConfigurable="true" ovf:value="puppet" ovf:qualifiers="MinLen(0),MaxLen(65535)">

                        <Label>Configuration Management Server (Optional)</Label>

                        <Description>Your configuration management server&apos;s fully-qualified name (e.g. config.avamar.com ). Blank if none.</Description>

                </Property>

        </Section>

        <Section xsi:type="vadk:AnyOVFSection_Type">

                <Info>

            Unknown OVF elements in this element will be passed directly

            to the OVF output descriptor without interpretation

        </Info>

        </Section>

        <Section xsi:type="vadk:UpdateSection_Type">

                <Info/>

                <vadk:Repository vadk:url="" vadk:username="" vadk:password="" vadk:passwordFormat="base64"/>

Hi All,

I want to alter the "Power on after deployment" checkbox's default behavior, which is part of the last page of deployment. By default this box is not checked, is there a setting I can include in the OVF file to toggle its behavior? Is it even possible? I tried to google it but hard luck!

Thanks in Advance!

- Punit

Hi Experts,

We are trying to build an ova package which has multiple virtual machines (something like LAMP VM, AD VM )

Can we have selective vm deployments? say user gets to select what he wants to install.

Is this possible?

TIA

srinivas

Hi Everyone,

I was trying to deploy a VM using the ovftool, I thought I would use the properties which are thrown from a "probe" of the OVA file.

ovftool http://server/files/builds/vpas/6.0.0/latest/vPAS-installer.ova

Properties:

  ClassId:     vami

  Key:         gateway

  InstanceId   vPAS

  Category:    Networking Properties

  Label:       Default Gateway

  Type:        string

  Description: The default gateway address for this VM. Leave blank if DHCP is

               desired.

  ClassId:     vami

  Key:         DNS

  InstanceId   vPAS

  Category:    Networking Properties

  Label:       DNS

  Type:        string

  Description: The domain name servers for this VM (comma separated). Leave

               blank if DHCP is desired.

  ClassId:     vami

  Key:         ip0

  InstanceId   vPAS

  Category:    Networking Properties

  Label:       Network 1 IP Address

  Type:        string

  Description: The IP address for this interface. Leave blank if DHCP is

               desired.

  ClassId:     vami

  Key:         netmask0

  InstanceId   vPAS

  Category:    Networking Properties

  Label:       Network 1 Netmask

  Type:        string

After having made sure that such properties exists from the probe, I tried to use them to give the VM a static IP post deployment, automatically.

ovftool --datastore="31_datastore" --acceptAllEulas --ipAllocationPolicy=fixedPolicy --name="vPAS_31_1" --powerOn --prop:ip0="172.16.121.115" --prop:netmask0="255.255.0.0" --prop:DNS="172.16.1.10" --prop:gateway="172.16.1.1" http://server/vpas/6.0.0/latest/vPAS-installer.ova vi://root:password@172.16.121.31/

Opening OVA source: http://server/files/builds/vpas/6.0.0/latest/vPAS-installer.ova

The manifest validates

Opening VI target: vi://root@172.16.121.31:443/

Deploying to VI: vi://root@172.16.121.31:443/

Transfer Completed                   

Powering on VM: vPAS_31_1

Warning:

- OVF property with key: 'DNS' does not exists.

- OVF property with key: 'gateway' does not exists.

- OVF property with key: 'ip0' does not exists.

- OVF property with key: 'netmask0' does not exists.

Completed successfully

Can someone please explain me whether this is a common problem ( from VMware ) or something I am doing wrong?

Thanks,

HI

I got Workstation 7.1.5

I want to migrate my VM on to Esxi5.5

I tried to convert .vmx to .ovf with Command (ovftool E:\VM\VM4\VM4.vmx E:\OVF\OVF4\VM4.ovf)

But its failing with error :

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool E:\VM\VM4\VM4.vmx E:\OVF\OVF4\VM

4.ovf

Opening VMX source: E:\VM\VM4\VM4.vmx

Error: Failed to open disk: Windows Server 2008 x64-cl2.vmdk

Completed with errors