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.
Vmware Ovf Tool Download Mac
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.
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 4.4.3 supports the same operating systems as OVF Tool 4.4.
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
If you'd still like to participate, I can recommend following -to-manually-install-folding-home-on-vmware-photon-os.html which shows you how to build your own F@H Appliance. Since ESXi 6.x is no longer supported, there's not much more we can do.
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:
In the case of standalone ESXi hosts, you could copy VMs between ESXi hosts by leveraging some of the tools, like VMware Converter, or you could even export the virtual machine to the jump host Windows system and then import the same into the destination host, but all this would take a while and you are dependent on a middle-man system for the VMware Converter installation or during import and export.
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
I managed to convert the OVA file to VMDK. Im trying to install the Netsus appliance in amazon EC2. Im trying this using the command line tools and getting an error about the source compression. Any ideas?
The OVF Tool is installed on the same location as the CD key. We now need to look for the path where it is. On the other hand, the path for our OVF tool in our example would be C:/Program Files/VMware/VMware OVF Tool.
Download the ovftool.
Open a Windows command prompt with administrator privileges (cmd.exe)
You can access ovftool in the following directory: *C:/Program Files/VMware/VMware> OVF Tool.
The OVF Tool can be downloaded directly from the Windows site where your VM will be stored as an OVF. From the VMware page, choose the most recent and available version of the tool. Download the tool and create a My VMware account; there may still be issues.
I've edited my /etc/paths file and for good measure did the PATH=/Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool:$PATH along with adding it to my bash profile. Yet when I run the command ovftool I get the command not found message. Am I missing something here, is there some other way to set a PATH that I'm not aware of? This same exact path for this same tool has worked before on my machine.
EDIT: Here is the print out from my path_helperPATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/ovftool.app:/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/:/Applictions/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/VMware\ OVF\ Tool:/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Public:/usr/local/go/bin:/Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool"; export PATH;
The below steps are outdated, VMware has moved the OVF Tool to a different site. I'll update this page or create a new post about this in the future. For now, use the following link to download the OVF Tool. Installing and using the tool is still the same.
Well, that is interesting. I was expecting the installer to look for ovftool in the /Applications directory, but instead it is a private path. Next, I decided to check the directory reporting the error. I made it to:
There are a few tools that you can use to make administration for your environment simpler. But you would always need the vSphere Client on Windows at least once after installation of ESXi to for example import the vCenter Virtual Appliance (explained here) Or to create a virtual machine.
Once your ESXi-host is up and running and you have multiple virtual machines running and maybe also vCenter deployed as a virtual appliance then you can access the console of those virtual machines with VMware Player. This tool is available as a download for Windows and Linux (www.vmware.com/go/downloadplayer) and it's included with Mac OS X.
Another possibility to work with your ESXi-host from the command line is to use the vSphere Command Line interface (vCLI). This can be installed as an application on your Linux-system but also on a Windows-system. Information and the download can be found here: www.vmware.com/support/developer/vcli
gosddc/packer-post-processor-vagrant-vmware-ovf.This repo contains a packer post processor that leverages VMware OVF Tool to create a vmware_ovf Vagrant box that is compatible with vagrant-vcloud, vagrant-vcenter and vagrant-vcloudair vagrant providers. It is only compatible with the packer VMware builder.
gosddc/packer-templates.This repo contains Packer templates for boxes available at , they only work with VMware and require the packer-post-processor-vagrant-vmware-ovf post-processor to work. These templates are a good starting point for generating pakcer templates on VMware products.
There were some discussions earlier this week about copying Virtual Machines from one ESXi host to another ESXi host that reminded me of a very cool feature in the ovftool that could help with this task(which I thought I had written about already). As you probably have guessed by now, I am a big fan of the ovftool and have written several articles here, here and here. It still surprises me with the amount of features this little utility contains and this particular one is definitely a cool one!
If you have ever needed to copy a Virtual Machine from one host to another, it can be a challenge sometimes, especially if you do not have shared storage. You can of course leverage tools like VMware Converter or exporting the VM to a "middle man" system and then re-importing that VM into the destination host but it could take awhile or you have to run a Windows system. Well, if you are looking for a quick and easy way to copy a VM from one host to another, try using the ovftool.
Now that we have identified our VM, we just need to specify the source ESXi host and the destination ESXi host as well as the datastore using the -ds option. Here is an example of using ovftool to export the VM from one ESXi host to another ESXi host:
If anyone is interested in how this works, the system that is running ovftool acts as a proxy between your source and destination. The system running ovftool IS in the data path during the transfer but its only for the data to stream from source->client->destination. Nothing is stored on the client system and you do not need to have the storage capacity of what you are transferring. This is very nifty little feature that many people are not aware of with ovftool.
So if you are importing/exporting VM's using the OVF how does that stack up to using CP or the HTTP get/put from a performance standpoint? Obviously the OVF tool is made for virtual machine related functions so maybe the performance is better? Sounds like I will need to do some further testing...
[[email protected] downloads]# ovftool vi://[email protected]Please enter login information for source vi://10.101.102.13/Username: rootPassword: *********Error: Found wrong kind of object (ResourcePool). Possible completions are: TSMSRV1 TSMSRV2 centos2 centos3 openfiler1 vma
[[email protected] downloads]# ovftool -ds=ds_12 vi://[email protected]/centos2 vi://[email protected]Please enter login information for source vi://10.101.102.13/Username: rootPassword: *********Opening VI source: vi://[email protected]:443/centos2Error: Could not open URL -nfc/52c5119b-f877-91c7-dc66-0eadbf657559/disk-1 (response code: 500)Completed with errors
update, here my command; name and disk mode comes handy as default is to blow up thin to thick.ovftool -ds=ds2 -dm=thin -n=DEV_newbox vi://[email protected]/Win2008x64R2_template vi://[email protected]
Well, that was super embarrassing. I told a network dude to use the "middle-man" approach as you described in the article. He went off and found ovftool and copied over 200GB in 10 minutes when my suggestion took many hours (he actually cancelled it before it completed to find a faster way). So off the google-izer I go to find out about ovftool copying VMs. Thanks for sharing. 2ff7e9595c
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