Quick Tip - How to upload files to vCloud Air On-Demand using ovftool?

I have recently spent some time playing around with the new vCloud Air On-Demand offering and with the free $300 credit promotion which I am currently using, it is an easy and painless way of evaluating vCloud Air. A common operation that many of you will most likely be performing when you first get setup is uploading content to be used within vCloud Air. You can do this by either using the UI in vCloud Director OR you can use one of my favorite command-line tools called ovftool.

To assist with using ovftool, I have created a simple shell script called upload-to-vca.sh which wraps ovftool and you simply just need to fill out a couple of required variables and the script will automatically handle the rest.

Note: Though the script is is specifically for a *nix/Mac OS X environment, the ovftool syntax is exactly the same for a Windows based environment. You just need to change the variable type and can then easily get this working on a Windows system using a simple batch or PowerShell script.

There are four pieces of information that you will need to pull from your vCloud Air On-Demand environment which will map to the following variables:

1. VCA_URL - This is the vCloud Director URL found when logging into your vCloud Air On-Demand instance
2. VCA_ORG_NAME - This is the name of your Organization for your vCloud Air On-Demand, it will be in a UUID type format
3. VCA_ORG_VDC_NAME - This is the name of your Virtual Datacenter that you would need to create when initially logging int
4. VCA_CATALOG_NAME - This is the vCloud Director Catalog name, by default it is called "default-catalog" unless you go into vCloud Director to create a custom one

To find the VCA_URL you just need to look at the base of the URL when logged into your vCloud Air On-Demand instance, in my example it is us-california-1-3.vchs.vmware.com and to find the VCA_ORG_VDC_NAME you will look under the "Virtual Data Centers" section as seen in the screenshot below. In my example, it is called vGhetto-VDC

To find the next two variables, you will need to open up the vCloud Director UI. To do so, just right click on the name of your VDC and select "Manage Catalogs in vCloud Director". Once logged in, you can find the VCA_ORG_VDC_NAME by looking at the URL after the /org/ entry (which you can copy/paste) but it is also displayed at the upper left corner when you first log in. In my example, it is the b51b26... Finally, to find the VCA_CATALOG_NAME you just need to click on the Catalogs tab and by default vCloud Air will use default-catalog as the name of your private Catalog. If you decide to create a new one, then you will need to use that name instead.

Once we have all four of the variables filled out based on our vCloud Air On-Demand instance, we also need to specify within the script whether we want to upload an ISO/floppy image or an OVA/OVF. There are two examples in the script and just un-comment the one you wish to run. Once you have completed editing the script, you can go ahead and run it and it will prompt you for your vCloud Air credentials which is what you used to initially sign into vchs.vmware.com.

Here is an example of uploading an OVF to my vCloud Air On-Demand VDC:

In my environment, I have uploaded both a Nested ESXi OVF template which should be stored under the vApp Tempalates tab as well as an ESXi 6.0 ISO which will be stored under the Media & Other section as shown in the screenshots below.

At this point, I can now consume both my OVF and ISO either directly in the vCloud Director UI or I can jump back to my vCloud Air UI and consume it that way as shown in the screenshot below.

If you have a lot content to upload or just prefer using the CLI (like I do), then this is a great way to easily upload content so that it is accessible in vCloud Air.