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You are here: Home / Automation / Really cool updates with OVFTool 4.4 and support for vSphere 7

Really cool updates with OVFTool 4.4 and support for vSphere 7

04.02.2020 by William Lam // 5 Comments

vSphere 7 has officially GA'ed this morning and with folks starting to download ESXi and the vCenter Server Appliance, do not forget about all the supporting tools such as the latest PowerCLI 12.0 release which includes a number of enhancement as well as the various vSphere Management and Automation SDKs.

🚀 #vSphere7 is now GA 🚀

Start your downloads (RN’s still staging) & make sure to tune in to launch later this morning!

🔸VCSA RN:https://t.co/d6hr8ndAiG
🔹ESXi RN: https://t.co/d6hr8ndAiG

🔸VCSA Download: https://t.co/FbYluRI9te
🔹ESXi Download: https://t.co/bfHRAzzS43

— William Lam (@lamw) April 2, 2020

One of my most frequently used tools on a daily basis, some times even more than PowerCLI is OVFTool which is now at version 4.4 which officially supports vSphere 7 but it also includes a number of really awesome enhancements and bug fixes. 

  • OVFTool 4.4 Release Notes
  • OVFTool 4.4 Download

While looking over the OVFTool release notes, I noticed a few interesting tidbits that I thought was worth calling out:

OVF Tool now can upload disk files to the host in parallel, and download disk files from the host in parallel. OVA is unsupported. Parallelism is limited by the number of CPUs. See the --parallelThreads=N option in the OVF Tool User's Guide for details.

This is a most welcome feature for customers with extremely large VMs where upload and/or downloads of OVAs can take a considerable amount of time as only a single CPU thread is used. With this feature, you can now enable multiple CPU threads with the --parallelThreads parameter which should really with performance! Even for smaller size VMs, you can still benefit if you have additional CPU resources to allocate and something I will be using going forward!

For multi-disk virtual machines, OVF Tool now includes the --multiDatastore flag to specify datastore per disk. See the OVF Tool User's Guide for details.

This is another welcome feature for customers where you might have an OVA that contains multiple VMDKs and want to explicitly place them on specific datastore.

The ARM64 architecture on Linux is now supported.

Finally, I thought this was very interesting to see that OVFTool has been ported over to ARM64 for Linux which means we can run now run OVFTool on a Raspberry Pi or even an Amazon A1 EC2 Instance! This might come handy in the future and I wonder if OVFTool for ESXi would be the next logical step? 🙂

I highly recommend you check out the rest of the release notes as it contains many more enhancements and fixes, many of which I have reported from the community and/or by our customers. I think this is certainly one of the tools you can upgrade immediately as it has great backwards compatibility with older vSphere releases but you can also take advantage of all the new features mentioned above immediately. If there are other OVFTool improvements or enhancements you really would like to see, feel free to leave a comment along with the use case and I will past that on to Engineering.

More from my site

  • vSphere ESXi 7.x will be last version to officially support Apple macOS Virtualization
  • OVFTool 4.4.1 - Upload OVF/OVA from URL using upcoming "pull" mechanism
  • How to patch Intel NUC 10 with latest ESXi 7.0 update?
  • Changing the default size of the ESX-OSData volume in ESXi 7.0
  • Heads Up - Nested ESXi crashes in ESXi 7.0 running on older CPUs

Categories // Automation, ESXi, OVFTool, vSphere 7.0 Tags // ESXi 7.0, ovftool, vSphere 7.0

Comments

  1. Marcelo Costa says

    04/02/2020 at 2:26 pm

    The free version is not available yet?

    Reply
  2. Eugene says

    04/02/2020 at 7:16 pm

    Has Automation / Rest reached parity with Web Services? Or vice versa?

    Reply
  3. saneboy says

    04/03/2020 at 5:20 am

    Disappointed to see that IBM M1015 driver support has been removed in ESXi 7.0.

    Reply
  4. James says

    06/25/2020 at 2:57 am

    Has anyone been able to get the Ovftool running on a Raspberry Pi?

    I have downloaded, extracted but when I try and run I get ./ovftool: line 27: /etc/ovftool/ovftool.bin: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      06/25/2020 at 1:26 pm

      Are you using rPI 3/4 and using a 64-Bit OS like Ubuntu or PhotonOS? The default raspbianOS is only 32-bit

      Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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