I have written several articles in the past about the awesome ovftool which is a versatile remote command-line utility for importing/exporting virtual machines in the OVF format across various VMware products. I mainly run ovftool in either the vMA or on my OSX desktop. When performing an import, the OVF files are local on the same system that has the ovftool installed.
I recently came across an interesting question about using the ovftool to deploy OVF files that are located on an ESXi datastore. My initial thought was that you would not be able to deploy the OVF files since the ovftool would not have access to the files locally. After finishing a recent article about ESXi datastore management using the vCLI's vifs utility, I then realized there might actually be a way to deploy OVF files that are stored on an ESXi datastore.
If you take a look on page 17 of the ovftool user guide, there is a table describing the various source locators that are supported. You can see that the source of an OVF file can be accessed by ovftool in 4 different methods including HTTP/HTTPs which is a key for this specific request.
| Source Type | Default File | Extension Protocol |
| OVF | .ovf | File, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP |
| OVA | .ova | File, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP |
| VMX | .vmx | File |
| vvApprun | N/A | File |
| vCloud Director | N/A | HTTPS |
| vSphere | N/A | vSphere |
Files and folders management for a datastore is exposed through the fileManager in the vSphere API and datastores are referenced as a URL or remote path.
A URL has the form
scheme://authority/folder/path?dcPath=dcPath&dsName=dsName
where
- scheme is http or https.
- authority specifies the hostname or IP address of the Center or ESX(i) server and optionally the port.
- dcPath is the inventory path to the Datacenter containing the Datastore.
- dsName is the name of the Datastore.
- path is a slash-delimited path from the root of the datastore.
Putting all this together, you can use the ovftool remotely to deploy an OVF file that is stored on an ESX(i) datastore. Below is an example walk through of this process.
Here is an OVF that is stored on a datastore located on an ESXi host:
To identify the URL path to your OVF, you can use a web browser to assist. Point your browser to the following address: https://[ESXI_HOST]/folder
When you first login, you will be brought to the root datacenter, in the case of directly connecting to an ESX(i) host, you will only see "ha-datacenter". Go ahead and select it and then you will be brought to a list of datastores the host has access to.
Select the datastore which contains the OVF file you wish to deploy from and then browse to the specific file.
Make a note of the URL path used to get to the OVF file and the OVF filename itself. Taking the example above, we end up with the following URL path:
https://vesxi50-4.primp-industries.com/folder/MyVM/MyVM.ovf?dcPath=ha-datacenter&dsName=iSCSI-1
To confirm the URL path, we can use ovftool to perform a simple "probe" on our OVF, this will provide you with a quick summary of the OVF.
Next we are ready to import the OVF file to our ESXi host. In this example, we will deploy the OVF to another datastore the ESXi host has access to and configure a specific portgroup to connect to the VM to after deployment. There are various options that can be passed to ovftool, please refer to the ovftool user guide for more details.
One the import has completed, you should now see the VM automatically registered in your ESXi host inventory.
You can see that this method allows you to import an OVF file stored on a datastore locally to the ESXi host as well as an OVF file stored on a remote datastore of another ESXi host. To help manage and deploy your OVF files, you should consider storing them on a centralized "media" datastore or even a WEB/FTP server that can be accessed by the ovftool.
This is great. I don't know if you tried, but I took the VIC client directly to the ESXi host and attempted to deploy ovf/ova and inserted the https url indicated above. I got an error message but assumed it was my ova, because I also got an error message with ovftool 2.1 (win32) and the same ova/ovf.
oh well thanks!
v pham
Actually, just found that if you paste the URL into the 'deploy ovf/ova' window of the vSphere client, it works as well, so no need for installing additional tools. 🙂
Yes, you can use the vSphere Client but the article was specific to using ovftool via the CLI 🙂
Hi William,
I am looking for command-line for exporting a VM on ESXI.
I do not have vcenter server installed.
Thanks in advance,
Sachin
I am using this method, but speed is too low. I am connected to ESX via remote vsphere-client. I guess, using this way, first .ova file is coming to my client and then getting deployed back into esx. Speed is equivalent to the method when I deploy the ova from my local system.
Could it be not possible to deploy the ova file there itself.
I was not able to do this...I was prompted for a username and password after entering the URL. The root user and password that I use for my ESX host was not accepted though.
Disable lockdown mode on your ESXi host.
I am getting the error "Error: Curl error: URL using bad/illegal format or missing URL"
vi-admin@vMA:~> ovftool "https://192.168.1.205/folder/MyVM.ovf?dcPath=ha-datacenter&dsName=local-datastore" "vi://[email protected]:443/"
Please enter login information for source https://192.168.1.205/folder/
Username: root
Password: **********
Opening OVF source: https://192.168.1.205/folder/MyVM.ovf
The manifest validates
Please enter login information for target vi://192.168.1.205/
Username: root
Password: **********
Error: Curl error: URL using bad/illegal format or missing URL
Completed with errors
Any ideas? Thanks!
Figured it out, it was because my ESXi password had special characters. Changed the ESXi password and it works fine. What a crappy error message 🙂
Laura,
You can convert any special characters in the username and password to "URL-Safe" characters,
for example:
' ' should be written as '%20' (blank)
'!' should be written as '%21'
'\' should be written as '%5C'
You can actually convert ALL characters in the username and/or password to "URL-Safe" characters,
just to make sure you have a valid identifier for the ovftool.
When I try to use an OVA in this method, I get "Error: Failed to open OVF descriptor". If I use the OVA in the viclient it works fine. If I use the https address in the vSphere Web Client, I get the descriptor error. If I use a local browse file path in the web client, it works fine.
Am I missing something? I'd like to use the ovftool since it allows me to specify the new seSparse disk format.
same proble, did'u find solutions?
I had troubles with --net: syntax, it just kept complaining about
--net:Centos-6.3-amd64%20%28aa22b2ce-1e1e-4888-8b26-27a9396a1519%29=VM%20Network
Error: Invalid OVF name (Centos-6.3-amd64%20%28aa22b2ce-1e1e-4888-8b26-27a9396a1
519%29) specified in net mapping. OVF networks: . Target networks: 10.4.2.x Ne
twork 10.4.3.x Network 10.4.7.x Network VM Network
Completed with errors
I tried "." for OVF name, tried the full text, tried "VM%20Network" as the target, as well as " " in there - none of them worked.
I tried without the --net, which also completed with errors, yet did not create the target object VM.
You could enclose everything after net: with double quotes. for example:
-net:"Internal=VM Network 2" --net:"External=VM Network 3" --net:"Management Network=VM Network"
I have also encountered "Error: SHA1 digest of file .* does not match manifest". A workaround is to enable --skipManifestCheck switch.
Regarding the problems with "--net", I had the same. For me it worked out to switch the order of your assignment like:
-net:"VM Network 2=Internal"
Hi,
I get to the login section, when I press after username:root,
I just get stars (******************************************) filling the terminal window. Anyone seen this?
Actually, now I see that it seems like I keep holding a key and flooding the password entry like this:
Username: root
Password: ****************************** etc until I press
I have the same result (Password:**************** etc until I press CRTL+C
Somebody have a solution ?
you have to verfiy password and username as in powershell scripting some character have special meaning for example ! = %21 and Please verify you credential.
I'm finding that the login window keeps popping up as if the credentials are not good, even though I am able to login and browse the datastore via a browser. Lockdown is disabled, obv. Any idea?
OMG finally I found what I was looking for! Thank you for this article
Can you do this on a free ESXi Host? I keep trying this from putty and it says the OVFtool is not found although I installed the msi for 64bit based machines.
Not sure, you'll have to try. ovftool should not be running inside ESXi, it's supposed to be installed from a remote system either Windows/Mac/Linux. Please refer to the ovftool documentation for more details on installation
This is for importing. Can you give the syntax for exporting to a local datastore?
HI,
This article is really awesome.
I need help on similar stuff.I am trying a little different usage of OVF toll.I successfully deployed PSC thon ESX e using ovf build deploy on a linux VM. Now I am trying to run UPGRADE that.
I tried below command line but no luck
ovftool –ds=datastoreName –acceptAllEulas "source url of ovf of higher version i.e. http://...abc.ovf" "target ie.vi://user:pass@ip of machine/"
If you can provide some input that will be of great help.
Thanks in advance
Has anybody tried accessing VM inside Esxi5.5 host.
I am always getting Error while probing OVA inside datastore.
ovftool.exe "https://myVMhost.com/folder/VM/myVM.ova?dcPath=ha-datacenter&dsName=datastore1"
Username: root
Password: *******
Error: Failed to open OVF descriptor
worked with following option:
ovftool.exe -st=ova “https://myVMhost.com/folder/VM/myVM.ova?dcPath=ha-datacenter&dsName=datastore1″
Thank you for that answer it fixes same problem here with vSphere 6.0.
This is great! I've spend the best part of the day looking for this information. Thanks so much for sharing this!
Hi,
I am getting error o vSphere client after deploy the OVF file from ESXi datastore.
The remote server returned an error 503 server unavailable vmware .
Directly using the URL is also able to deploy, but i was trying URL wrongly. after seeing this areticle realized that we need to get the OVA url exactly (just rick-click on the ova copy link adress and re-use in Vsphere client) 🙂
When I try deploying to a free host like so:
ovftool --sourceType=ova --datastore="myds1" --name="vm-base" vm.ova "vi://root:@hostname"
it fails with the same cURL error like above:
Error: cURL error: SSL connect error
However when I try doing the exact same thing on a different host it works without any issues
ovftool --sourceType=ova --datastore="myds1" --name="vm-base" vm.ova "vi://root:@hostname1"
What could be the error?
For the record, just in case you miss it, my ESXi host has no password whatsoever, in case that is not explicit from the string above so the question of 'special characters' in the password shouldn't arise.
If a url is provided does the traffic for the ova upload remain between the esxi host and the file server?
In this case, what's the data path? For example I have source and destination esxi:datastore far away from my ovftools workstation, will the data travel from source esxi to ovftools and then destination esxi?
The interesting part is that the files is actually downloaded to your PC and than uploaded back.
Which makes this a bit obsolete...
Thanks for sharing ! quite important to know that
I know it's an old but great article but thought I'd leave a comment in case anyone else cannot get the OVFTool to work on ESXi 6.5.
I couldn't get the latest OVFTool version (4.4.0 P1) working on ESXi 6.5 build 16207673 initially but got round it by installing the 32-bit Linux version 4.1.0 package on to a CentOS 7 VM.
I then followed the article steps and now I deploy OVFs to my ESXi hosts in my home lab using Puppet Bolt !
How do you find the url path in ESXi 6.5? Or how do you point to local datastore?
Thanks.