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OVA files are just an OVF directory saved in a single archive using tar packaging in order to make it easier to distribute.ĭeploying an OVF or OVA template into VMware vCenter is similar to deploying a virtual machine from a template – you will be presented with a deployment wizard, which will ask you to populate some configuration settings such as IP address, hostname and DNS configuration. The OVF standard is not tied to any particular hypervisor, as such you may have seen OVFs for use with vSphere and Hyper-V etc.Īn OVA file is saved in the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).
OVF VMWARE APPLIANCE SOFTWARE
The standard describes an “open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines”. Open Virtualization Format ( OVF) is an open standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances.
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ovf format, so it is possible to convert from one to the other. The .ova file format is interchangeable with the. There is also the Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) format.
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The file format most commonly used is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). Virtual appliances tend to be made available in a couple of main formats. Often virtual appliances can be downloaded from virtual appliance marketplaces. Virtual appliances are intended to eliminate the installation, configuration and maintenance costs associated with running complex stacks of software. What is a Virtual Appliance?Ī virtual appliance is a pre-configured virtual machine image, ready to run on a hypervisor such as VMware’s ESXi Typically a virtual appliance includes an operating system and some configuration all packed up into a file that can be distributed and imported easily. Before going through the process, it is probably worth providing some background information. I kept receiving an Operation Timed Out error, so thought I would attempt to convert it to OVF then try again. To make sure it is at least ready to take API calls before continuing, I will run vmware_about_facts once a minute until it succeeds.I recently needed to convert OVA to OVF, as I was having problems deploying a virtual appliance from the OVA it was packaged as. Sometimes this is good enough, but the VCSA may take another 20 minutes or so before it is actually usable. Once the OVF deploys, the module can wait for an IP address before continuing. I’ve substituted Ansible variable names so I can define these in the vars file associated with this playbook. ovf, formatted for the vmware_deploy_ovf module:ĭeploymentOption.value: '' Here are the relevant properties extracted from the. mf file and deploy the edited ovf file instead of the original ova file. If you ever need to flip userConfigurable to true for some property, the OVF file itself can be edited, but doing so invalidates the hashes in the. The VCSA has one property that has userConfigurable:false that we need to configure anyway to make the deployment fully automatic:Ĭurrently, Ansible allows properties to be configured in the playbook regardless of the userConfigurable setting, at least when the deployment target is an ESXi host. In the case of the VCSA several properties are specific to upgrades, so I’ll ignore those. Also some value are not applicable to all deployment options. Some values are not intended to be user configurable. Notice that the value of ovf:userConfigurable is not always true. Expected values are usually explained by the text, which is what the OVF deployment UI in vCenter would present to a user performing this task interactively. The property name is the value of ovf:key, and the default value is defined in ovf:value. Next move on to the property section of the xml: This becomes the first value in the property list in the playbook: Most of the time for my homelab or nested lab scenarios the one I want is ‘tiny’. In the case of the VCSA, there are a lot of deployment options to choose from. This section is not always present, but if an OVF supports multiple deployment options they are defined here. The first thing to look for in a OVF file is the DeploymentOptionSection. It is really just an xml file, and it can be viewed in any text editor. The OVF file defines the virtual machine(s), deployment options, and properties that make up the virtual appliance. OVA files are tar archives with a specific set of constraints, so anything that can extract a tar can extract an OVA. Next we need to extract the OVA to get at the ovf file. It’s located in the vcsa folder within the VCSA ISO. In the case of the VCSA, first we need to grab the OVA file. To get those properties, we have to pull apart the OVA and examine its ovf xml file. We just have to know what properties the virtual appliance is expecting. Setting ‘inject_ovf_env’ to ‘true’ will pass the properties to the VM at power on.