ERROR: Not a supported disk format(Invalid sparse VMDK header)

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