For automation purposes, customers use the handy OVFTool, which is a multi-platform command-line utility for uploading or exporting OVF/OVA images. During an upload, users would typically specify the –network argument which will assign the desired vSphere Network to the deployed VM and if the VM included multiple network adapters, it would assign the same network which can then be modified during post-deployment.
What if you had a OVF/OVA that included multiple network adapters and you wanted a different network for each adapter? Luckily, this is also supported with OVFTool by using the –nic argument, which expects the network name as codified within the OVF/OVA to tell OVFTool which vSphere Network to assign. You can find OVF/OVA network name by simply running OVFTool command against the OVF/OVA without any arguments and you should see the name as shown in the screenshot below.
Note: The network name in the OVF/OVA MUST be unique to be able to assign different networks during upload.
In the example above, I have two network adapters and network name are: net1 and net2, which are captured as part of the initial export of the VM. This means that this OVF/OVA had been attached to two vSphere Networks called net1 and net2, respectively.
Once you have identified the OVF/OVA network names, then you can specify the desired vSphere Network for each adapter by using the following syntax:
--net:"net1"="VSPHERE_NETWORK_1" \ --net:"net2"="VSPHERE_NETWORK_2" \
Thanks for the comment!