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Quick Tip - Encoding special characters for OVFTool on the command-line

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If you use strong and complex passwords that contain special characters (which you should), it can some times be challenging from an automation perspective on how to properly escape these characters, which can also depend on the scripting or programming language that you are using.

Today I learned about a nice little enhancement in OVFTool 4.4 or later, which makes it easy to handle complex passwords containing special characters by supporting URL encoding for these characters. This is also great for those writing automation scripts and not having to input the password interactively but can now be added to OVFTool command-line string.

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Quick Tip - How to deploy OVF/OVA to multiple networks using OVFTool?

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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.

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Automating the deployment of Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu

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I recently wrote about our Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu solution and how it can really benefit IT Admins, beyond just the App Modernization use case which it was primarily designed for. App Transformer is provided as a Virtual Appliance (OVA) and the deployment using the vSphere UI is very straight forward. In this blog post, we will focus on automating the deployment of the App Transformer OVA.

To demonstrate the automation, I have created two example scripts, one that uses PowerCLI and the other using OVFTool. Both scripts contain the exact same variable names that will need to be updated by customers based on their environment. You can find the description for each variable blow covering both the appliance and application settings.

App Transformer Appliance Settings

  • AT_IP - IP Addres
  • AT_NETMASK - Netmask
  • AT_GATEWAY - Gateway
  • AT_DNS - DNS Server
  • AT_DNS_DOMAIN - DNS Search Domain
  • AT_DNS_SEARCH - DNS Search Path
  • AT_NTP - NTP Server
  • AT_ROOT_PASSWORD - Password for root (requires a minimum of 12 characters)

App Transformer Application Settings:

  • AT_USERNAME - Username to login to App Transformer UI
  • AT_PASSWORD - Password to login to App Transformer UI (requires a minimum of 12 characters)
  • AT_ENCRYPTION_PASSWORD - Password used to encrypt the database
  • AT_INSTALL_EMBEDDED_HARBOR - Install Embedded Harbor registry, useful for proof of concept/testing purposes

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