How to Use OVF Tool to Export VM to OVF/OVA with Commands?

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VMware is the most popular server virtualization solution in the world and it is trusted by thousands of users for its excellent performance and convenient management.

In the daily maintenance of virtual environment, VM exporting and importing are common jobs. VMware provides vCenter to let users export VM to OVF, but it is not the only application to do these jobs.

For example, VMware OVF Tool can also do this for you.

VMware OVF Tool and its features

OVF Tool, short for Open Virtualization Format Tool, is a command-line utility that allows you to import and export OVF packages to and from many VMware products.

For exporting VM, IT administrators can use ESXi or vCenter to export VM template and deploy the template then. Sometimes IT administrators will find that it will result in a fail job when the VM is too large. To fix this issue, OVF Tool can help smoothly export and deploy large VM.

There are two kinds of VM templates in VMware, OVF and OVA. OVF template is a folder containing the metadata, applications, and other data, and OVA is a single file distribution of the OVF file package. Both of them can be used to recover VM or move VM to another ESXi host.

These templates can be not only used on VMware. If you wish, you can use V2V converters to import the templates to other virtualization platforms like KVM or Xen hosts. Some VM management tools like Xen Orchestra can directly recognize VMware OVA template.

vCenter once supported exporting both OVF and OVA templates but from vSphere 6.5, it no longer supports exporting OVA but luckily, you can still use OVF Tool to convert VM to OVA template.

OVF Tool can be downloaded from the site of VMware. The latest version is 4.4.3. It should be installed on ESXi host.

After you install it, the directory of OVF Tool needs to be remembered because there is no GUI for operating OVF Tool so you need to open it with command. The default directory is C:Program FilesVMwareVMware OVF Tool. 

How to export VM to OVF/OVA with OVF Tool?

1. Use CMD to open OVF Tool by typing the command below:

cd “<C:Program FilesVMwareVMware> OVF Tool”

2. Type the command below to export VM to OVF

ovftool.exe –noSSLVerify vi://ip_of_esxi_host where the machine resides/name of source_machine “D:ovf_export_name.ovf”

–noSSLVerify is used to skip SSL verification. Replace the host IP, VM name and the export destination with the real information.

If you wish to export VM to OVA, just replace ovf with ova in the command, like this:

ovftool.exe –noSSLVerify vi://ip_of_esxi_host where the machine resides/name of source_machine “D:ova_export_name.ova”

When you need to deploy the template, type the command below:

ovftool -ds=DestinationDatastore -n=DestinationVMName OVF.ovf vi://username:password@vCenter2/Datacenter2/host/Cluster2

How to convert OVF to OVA or OVA to OVF?

As mentioned before, OVF is a folder containing many files like VMDK, snapshot, etc. and OVA is like a zipped OVF. Can you zip the OVF and modify its format to use it as OVA or extract files from OVA and copy them into a folder to use it as OVF? It might not work but OVF Tool can help you convert the template.

To convert OVF into OVA, type the command below:

> ovftool /ovfs/my_vapp.ovf /ovfs/my_vapp.ova

To convert OVA into OVF, type the command below:

> ovftool /ovfs/my_vapp.ova /ovfs/my_vapp.ovf

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Conclusion

IT administrators often need to export and deploy VM via vCenter, but sometimes the job will fail if the VM is too large. To mitigate the situation, IT administrators can use OVF Tool to export and deploy large VM. The commands to use OVF Tool have been introduced in this post.

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