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Really cool updates with OVFTool 4.4 and support for vSphere 7

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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.

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. 

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.

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

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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!

OVFTool and VMware Cloud on AWS

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Recently, I had noticed a number of questions that have come up regarding the use of OVFTool with the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) service. I had a chance to take a look at this last Friday and I can confirm that customers can indeed use this tool to import/export VMs into VMC whether they are from a vSphere/vCloud Director-based environment or simply OVF/OVAs you have on your desktop. Outlined below are the requirements and steps that you must have setup before you can use OVFTool with VMC. In addition, I have also include an OVFTool command snippet which you can use and adapt in your own environment.

Requirements:

  1. You must setup VPN connection between your onPrem environment and the Management Gateway on VMC (direct internet access to ESXi is not supported)
  2. Configure the VMC Firewall to allow access between your onPrem and VMC's ESXi host on port 443 (data transfer occurs at ESXi host level)
  3. Specify the Workload VM Folder as a target
  4. Specify the Compute-ResourcePool Resource Pool as a target
  5. Specify the WorkloadDatastore Datastore as a target

Instructions:

Step 1 - Create a Management VPN connection, please see the official documentation here for more details.

Step 2 - Create a two new Firewall Rules that allow traffic from your onPrem environment to both vCenter Server and ESXi host on port 443. vCenter Server will obviously be used for UI/API access and for ESXi, this is where the data traffic transfer will take place.


Step 3 - Construct your OVFTool command-line arguments and ensure you are using the VM Folder "Workloads", Resource Pool "Compute-ResourcePool" and Datastore "WorkloadDatastore" as your target destination since the CloudAdmin user will have restrictive privileges within VMC.

Here is an example command to upload an OVA from my desktop to the VMC vCenter Server:

ovftool.exe `
--acceptAllEulas `
--name=William-To-The-Cloud `
--datastore=WorkloadDatastore `
--net:None=sddc-cgw-network-1 `
--vmFolder=Workloads `
C:\Users\primp\desktop\William.ova `
'vi://*protected email*:*protected email*/SDDC-Datacenter/host/Cluster-1/Resources/Compute-ResourcePool/'

Note: OVFTool also supports the ability to specify a VM that is residing in your vSphere environment as a source, so you do not have to export it locally to your desktop and you can directly transfer it (your client desktop acting as a proxy) to VMC.

Here is the output from running the above command:


Once the upload has completed, you should see your new VM appear in your vSphere Inventory