18-09-2021

Ovf Vmware For Mac

Overview The VMware OVF Tool is a conversion program freely downloadable from VMware that assists in the distribution of virtual machines (VMs) and vApps, converting them between OVF, VMX and OVA formats. It also includes a command‑line facility to import and export OVF packages between environments or from third party suppliers. The VMware OVF Tool is available for many platforms, including Windows, Linux, and MAC OSX. The OVF Tool provides a lot of features, such as importing and exporting OVFs, converting between any VMware-supported format (VMX, OVF, OVA, vCloud Director, etc.), signing OVF packages, and validating OVF package signatures—and many more.

OVF is a file format that supports exchange of virtual appliances across products and platforms. When you export a virtual machine as an OVF file, you create a directory that contains an OVF file and the virtual disk files. You might consider an OVF as an archive of all the files that belong to the OVF directory. OVA is a single file distribution of the same OVF file package.

Super smash flash 2 download 1 2 4 2. The OVF and OVA formats offer the following advantages:

  • OVF and OVA files are compressed, allowing for faster downloads.
  • The vSphere Web Client validates an OVF or OVA file before importing it, and ensures that it is compatible with the intended destination server. If the appliance is incompatible with the selected host, it cannot be imported and an error message appears.
  • OVF and OVA can encapsulate multi-tiered applications and more than one virtual machine.

Exporting OVF or OVA templates allows you to create virtual appliances that other users can import later. You can use the export function to distribute pre-installed software as a virtual appliance, or to distributing template virtual machines to users. You can make the OVF or OVA file available to users who cannot access your vCenter Server inventory.

Deploying an OVF or OVA template allows you to add pre-configured virtual machines or vApps to your vCenter Server or ESXi inventory. Deploying an OVF or OVA template is similar to deploying a virtual machine from a template. However, you can deploy an OVF or OVA template from any local file system accessible from the vSphere Web Client, or from a remote Web server. The local file systems can include local disks (such as C:), removable media (such as CDs or USB keychain drives), and shared network drives.

  • Published: March 6, 2017
  • Author:Ludovic Rivallain
  • Tags:scriptlinuxvmwareovfcustomization

In order to fully configure a virtual machine after a clone of OVF deployment, it may be useful to use settings from virtualization layer in the guest OS: for example to run Guest OS customization as already discussed in this blog.

Today, we will focus on OVF properties.

Vmware Workstation For Mac

  • Presentation of OVF properties
  • Get OVF properties from the guestOS

If you deploy some VM through OVF/OVA files, you are probably already familiar with OVF settings. They appear as the possibility to customize VM settings during the deployment process:

Typical OVF properties include: Network settings (IP address, netmask, gateway…), users configuration (username, password). As properties are not restrictives, it is possible to create custom keys to manage any other kind of customization.

OVF properties are a part of the full OVF environment encapsulating a VM deployment process and to use it inside of a VM, some scripting is necessary.

Representation of OVF properties

XML representation of an OVF environment configuration can be retrieved in a guest OS by 2 ways:

  • As a CD-ROM drive containing the XML document
  • VMware Tools in the guestinfo.ovfEnv variable

Here is an example of OVF environment of a VM with customized properties:

PropertySection contains the list of OVF properties that can be used to customize a guest OS. Netdrive 3 8 987 crack.

When you create a new template for OVF export, it is possible to create/edit/delete custom OVF properties.

Gta 5 shark card redeem code xbox one. From vSphere Web client -> Edit Settings of a VM -> vApp Options: In Authoring section, it is possible to give a name/version/url to describe your future OVF and to manage properties:

In the edition/creation wizard, the most useful fields are:

  • Label: How is named the parameter when user is prompted to fill its value
  • KeyID: How is named the parameter in the XML file
  • Category: a way to order parts of the customization form fields by grouping properties together
  • Description: to give more information about the purpose of the field to end users

It is possible to choose between 2 types of properties:

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  • Static propertie: Values will be configured by user or will be fixed by the default ones.
  • Dynamic propertie: Values will be set according to the virtualization layer information (ex: getting IP from an IP Pool attached to a PortGroup.)

Then you can choose between sub-types:

  • String
  • Password
  • Integer
  • Real
  • Boolean
  • (external) IP address
  • …

You can also set default value, or some requirements (like the minimal/maximal length of a string):

As we saw previously, a user deploying an OVF coming from export of VM where properties are set, will be prompted to fill the values of the properties.

it is also possible to edit properties values of an already deployed VM: From vSphere Web client -> Edit Settings of a VM -> vApp Options.

In this case, you may have to run ‘again’ some GuestOS glue code to take the change into account.

Mac

When you configure an OVF environment, you can choose between CD-ROM and VMware-tools methods to transport information into the virtual machine:

VMware tools

If you choose VMware tools transport method for OVF environment, according to the used OS type, the method to retrieve properties can vary a bit. Here are two samples to get the XML representation.

On Windows:

On Linux:

ISO image

If you choose ISO image transport method for OVF environment, you need to :

Ovf Vmware For Mac Pro 15

  1. mount the CD-ROM drive to your guest OS
  2. read the ovf-env.xml file

Properties usage

Here is a very simple Python helper to deal with the XML blob from OVF environment to export properties:

From here, it is pretty simple to customize the guest OS. For example, to change the root password based on root_password properties:

Ovf Vmware For Mac Pro 15

Now you are ready to produce OVF appliances with customization on deployment. This can be very useful to easily script the deployment of many VM instances or to provide a ‘ready-to-deploy’ appliances to customers.

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Full script for the customization of the guestOS can be found here: get-ovfenv.py