I have downloaded and installed OVF Tool for Mac, and the documentation doesn't have any help for Mac users. I tried to run some simple commands but nothing I do seems to work. I just need to be able to run OVF Tool to convert a Fusion 7 VM into an .ovf format I can then import into vSphere 5.5. Anyone know of a guide that could walk me through the Terminal commands required to do this?
Under (Mac) OS X the ovftool is a command line utility that is used from a Terminal and it appears that you do not know or understand the most rudimentary basics of computing from the command line.
Ovftool Vmware Download For Mac
Download: https://jinyurl.com/2vFkVD
The fact that I can't navigate to that directory in the GUI. When I would google how to find the ovftool everything kept pointing me to a directory path I couldn't navigate to in the Mac os gui. I didn't know how to view the contents of the application file. After some googling I now know that you can right click a .app file and choose "view package contents" which will allow you to navigate through the folder.
For this demo, I have downloaded and installed the VMware OVF tool for my windows based machine. Installation is quite simple as similar to all other windows installers. I am not going to explain each step of the OVF tool installation.
To export VM to OVA file using the VMware OVF tool, we have to call ovftool.exe along with the vCenter URL and credentials, and you will also need the path to your VM. To know the VM path, we can use the OVF Tool to discover the VM path.
This is the first major release since the initial release of OVF Tool 1.0 and a minor upgrade to the OVF Tool 2.0 version that is bundled with Fusion 3.1 and Workstation 7.1. You can download the OVF Tool for Windows 32-bit and 64-bit, Linux 32-bit and 64-bit, and now Mac OS X.
The ovftool option --allowAllExtraConfig is no longer supported. The command-line option --allowAllExtraConfig never worked as designed. As of release 6.5 U1, vSphere no longer supports this option. The workaround is to use --allowExtraConfig instead to import additional configurations.
The ovftool --proxy=proxy.example.com option should work, but when used within vSphere, it does not. To make a network connection through the proxy server, you must add the --X:viUseProxy option as documented in the OVF Tool User's Guide.
You can download the OVF Tool for installation onWindows 64-bit or 32-bit, Linux 64-bit or 32-bit, Mac OS X 64-bit, and ARM 64-bit.The OVF Tool landing page provides a link to the software download group for each release.OVF Tool 4.4 supports the following operating systems:
When the user does not specify a datastore, OVF Tool should display an error message,but instead it crashes with a segmentation fault.The workaround is to specify the datastore argument, as in this example:ovftool --datastore=vim.Datastore:datastore-2 myspec.ovf vi://sometarget
OVF Tool drops URL query parameters (after question mark), including authentication tokens.This functionality is required for VMC on AWS pre-signed URLs,and possibly for other public clouds.The workaround is to download the specified file to a local driveand then point OVF Tool at the local file.
The vSphere Integrated Containers Engine bundle includes the OVA-util utility. The OVA-util utility is a command-line utility that allows you to import and export OVF packages. This utility contains the ovftool command that you can use to deploy the vSphere Integrated Containers Appliance at the command line.
This section lists some of the basic ovftool options. You can set environment variables so that you do not have to specify the , , --datastore, --name, --net, and --prop options in every ovftool command.
René thank you for the directions, they worked great.For some that find it difficult to know the exact path when typing it out I use the following steps:Followed your steps up to 7, then step 8 did the followinga. In the Terminal window typed ./ovftoolb. located the *.vmx file, selected and dragged & dropped into Terminal * This puts the full pathc. Created a new folder for the converted filed. Selected the folder, dragged & dropped into the Terminal window * This puts the full pathe. Hit Enter
VMwareVMware Remote Console (VMRC) - VMware-VMRC-12.0.0-17287072.exe
VMware Remote Console 12.0.0 for Mac (macOS 10.15 and later)
VMware-ovftool-4.4.1-16812187-win.x86_64.msi
hostname: username$ /Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/ovftool /path/to/NetSUS_1.0.ova /path/to/NetSUS_1.0.vmxOpening OVA source: /path/to/NetSUS_1.0.ovaOpening VMX target: /path/to/NetSUS_1.0.vmxWriting VMX file: /path/to/NetSUS_1.0.vmxDisk Transfer Completed
Virtualization makes servers and applications completely portable, which in turn makes distributing virtual machines and their preinstalled applications simple. Taking advantage of this, VMware created the virtual appliance marketplace where thousands of VMs with applications (called virtual appliances) are available for download, most at no cost.
What is the OVFTOOL and where do you download it? You can create OVF packages to distribute to others and deploy OVF packages into your vSphere infrastructure without the OVFTOOL. However, the OVFTOOL is what will allow you to do these things at the command line.
You can download the OVFTOOL for both 32-bit Windows and 32-bit or 64-bit Linux at the VMware OVFTOOL Download page. Still, the single best place to access the download links, the OVFTOOL documentation and participate in a great forum dedicated to the OVFTOOL is the VMware's OVF Community.
In my case, I downloaded the OVFTOOL for Windows. It is a 12 MB file and installs quickly. Make sure that you take note of the directory that it is installed in because that is the directory that you will have to CD to in order to use OVFTOOL. Unlike other tools that you install, you won't find an icon or program group in the Windows Start Menu for OVFTOOL. To use it, you will have to open a Windows (or Linux) command prompt, CD into the installation folder, and run OVFTOOL.
In our case, I have opted to download the VMware vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). This is a free VMware virtual appliance, distributed in the OVF format. Just like the OVFTOOL, all you need to download it is a free VMware username and password.
About the "vCenter server and inventory path info," this is actually a locator. With OVFTOOL, a locator is a string that tells OVFTOOL exactly where in the vSphere infrastructure you want this appliance to be imported to. It is likely one of the more complex aspects of using the OVFTOOL, so make sure you read the special ovftool --help locatos help file.
In the first image, I used the string above to import the vMA OVF file that I downloaded to a vSphere server called "ESX3" managed by vCenter. I specified the data store, the name of the virtual machine once imported and that it should be powered on when the import is completed. I specified the username (administrator) in the locator. I could have specified the password but instead let the OVFTOOL prompt me for it.
The executable we need to run is ovftool.exe. We are aiming to convert .ova to .ovf so we need to also feed it the location of the source OVA file, and the destination path where we want the new OVF file to be created. My OVA file is called network.ova and I wish to output the OVF file to c:\temp\output. So to do the conversion, I can run the following:
I made a few export OVF attempts without success. The guest machine's OVF, and disk-2.vmdk were downloaded without errors, however, disk-1.vmdk couldn't be downloaded. The disk-1 is about 22GB in size on the host, disk-2 is less than 1GB.When I did it in Chrome, it showed network interruptionsWhen I did it in IE 11, the exact message was "The disk-1.vmdk download was interrupted."
I stick to IE, when I received the download error, and before I clicked Cancel the disk-1.vmdk download, I inspected the download file size, and I measured this 3 times, the results as follow:attempt#1, 03/08/17 06:32 AM 10,942,487,040 disk-1.vmdk.908quoc.partialattempt#2, 03/08/17 09:31 AM 10,942,487,040 disk-1.vmdk.n3pg05j.partialattempt#3, 03/08/17 10:13 AM 10,942,487,040 disk-1.vmdk.bb66hln.partial
*** test exporting, it gave the following output ***C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool.exe vi://192.168.1.18/win2012r2 "C:\Users\kor\Desktop\images\win2012r2-general"Enter login information for source vi://192.168.1.18/Username: rootPassword: ****************Opening VI source: vi://root@192.168.1.18:443/win2012r2Opening OVF target: C:\Users\kor\Desktop\images\win2012r2-generalWriting OVF package: C:\Users\kor\Desktop\images\win2012r2-general\win2012r2\win2012r2.ovfTransfer CompletedCompleted successfully
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool.exe -ds=ds1 -dm=thin -n=win2012r2.2 "C:\Users\kor\Desktop\images\win2012r2-general\win2012r2\win2012r2.ovf" vi://192.168.1.18Opening OVF source: C:\Users\kor\Desktop\images\win2012r2-general\win2012r2\win2012r2.ovfThe manifest validatesEnter login information for target vi://192.168.1.18/Username: rootPassword: ****************Opening VI target: vi://root@192.168.1.18:443/Deploying to VI: vi://root@192.168.1.18:443/Transfer CompletedCompleted successfully
*** conclusion ***I noted the successful disk1 file size is slightly larger than the one created by the ESXi Host Client export, the Host Client (or the browser) was not far from completing the export for disk1. I'm not sure the Host Client is the root of the issue. Until the export is possible with the Host Client, I'm happy that ovftool does the job and I'm able to script it for automation anyways.
We are aware of some issues around exporting large VMs via the host client. Like your conclusion, mine and my colleagues is also that there is nothing really wrong with Host Client. The downloads seem to get interrupted randomly. Unfortunately it's a very difficult bug to reproduce and debug. We have spent quite a long time on this already :( 2ff7e9595c
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