VMware Cloud on AWS

Quick Tip - Import OVF/OVA as VM Template using OVFTool 4.3 Update 1

01.29.2019 by William Lam // 5 Comments

OVFTool is an extremely versatile command-line utility for importing and exporting Virtual Machines to and from the OVF/OVA format and it supports a number of VMware platforms including VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), vSphere (vCenter Server and ESXi), Fusion, Workstation, Player and even vCloud Director (vCD).

An infrequent asks that I have seen from customers is the ability to deploy an OVF/OVA as a VM Template rather than just a Virtual Machine in a vSphere-based environment. OVFTool has had the ability to deploy to vAppTemplate for vCD-based environments, so it would make sense to also support vCenter Server VM Templates as well. Today, the workflow is a two-step process, deploy the OVF/OVA and then use the vSphere API to convert the VM to a VM Template.

With the latest OVFTool 4.3 Update 1 which was a minor release last year, we now have a new parameter called importAsTemplate which will allow customers to easily import an OVF/OVA directly into as a VM Template. Below is a quick sample using this new option and I am deploying to a VMC-based environment (see this article for requirements when using OVFTool with VMC)

ovftool.exe `
--acceptAllEulas `
--allowAllExtraConfig `
--name=PhotonOS-Template `
--datastore=WorkloadDatastore `
--net:None=sddc-cgw-network-1 `
--vmFolder=Templates `
--importAsTemplate `
C:\Users\william\Desktop\photon-hw13_uefi-3.0-49fd219.ova `
'vi://*protected email*@vcenter.sddc-a-b-c-d.vmwarevmc.com/SDDC-Datacenter/host/Cluster-1/Resources/Compute-ResourcePool/'

Once the upload has completed, we can take a look at our vSphere UI and see that our imported OVA been automatically been converted to a VM Template!

New VMC API to rename SDDC

01.12.2019 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

A commonly requested feature in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) is the ability to rename an SDDC. Currently, it is not possible to rename an SDDC after it has been deployed. On Friday, an update was made to the VMC Service to introduce a new VMC API (Tech Preview) that will allow customers to rename their SDDC. The API is just the first step and our UI folks are already working on adding this natively to the VMC UI which I actually got a sneak peak of just a few days ago.

UPDATE (02/11/19) - The ability to rename an SDDC is now also available within the VMC Console UI, so you can use either UI or API to perform this operation.

The new SDDC rename API is very straight forward to use, you simply perform a PATCH operation the specific SDDC /orgs/{orgID}/sddcs/{sddcID} which includes a payload containing the updated name. Below are three ways in which you can easily rename your SDDC, including a UI method for those that want to quickly rename an SDDC and not have to write a single line of code.

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