Exporting VMWare Server VMs to OVA/OVF with ovftool

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:56:25 +0000

Well, I thought this was going to be a huge pain in the ass, but it turns out not to be a really big deal. I found this post which includes instructions and a link to download VMWare’s “ovftool”. There’s a win32 version and a 32-bit and 64-bit linux version:

-rwxr--r-- 1 evan evan 19326184 Sep 11 17:16 VMware-ovftool-installer-1.0.0-166674-lin.i386.sh*
-rwxr--r-- 1 evan evan 17212108 Sep 11 17:16 VMware-ovftool-installer-1.0.0-166674-lin.x86_64.sh*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 evan evan 43833393 Sep 11 17:33 jdk-1_5_0_13-linux-amd64.bin*

I installed JDK 1.5.0_r13 because that’s what I had laying around. The 64-bit installer for ovftool ran without a hitch. I haven’t yet tried importing the .ova to my vCenter cluster (the export was from our Vmware Server (free) environment) but the conversion itself seemed fine. The one problem I encountered was that it was complaining that the cdrom was connected. The VM in question had an ISO configured as its cdrom drive, but it wasn’t connected, yet the ovftool still complained about it. I shutdown the VM, deleted the device completely, and then the conversion went fine.

Updated on Evan Hoffman

Exporting VMWare Server VMs to OVA/OVF with ovftool