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Quick Tip - Useful ovftool debugging options

08.16.2013 by William Lam // 7 Comments

This morning I needed perform several OVF uploads using ovftool and provide that information to engineering to investigate some performance issues. I tend to error on the side of providing more information than requested. The ovftool provides some really useful debugging options that are really handy in these situations but are un-documented. I can never seem to remember the exact syntax and hence I am documenting them here. I will also file a documentation bug to ensure these get added 🙂

UPDATE (08/19/13) - Thanks to one of the OVF engineers, it turns out you can see all the debug options and their definitions by running ovftool --help debug

The two options that I am referring to are:

--X:logFile=
--X:logLevel=

The first option allows you to log the entire ovftool session to a file which you can then send off to someone and the second option allows you to control the verbosity of the logs which I normally set to use verbose.

Here is an example of how you would use these ovftool options:

/Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/ovftool --X:logFile=upload.log --X:logLevel=verbose -ds=mini-local-datastore-2 '--net:Network 1=VM Network' VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.1.0.10200-1235310_OVF10.ova vi://[email protected]

Once the ovftool has completed its operation, you can take a look at the log and you will see quite a bit of information including some additional ovftool options that can be specified on the command-line which start with /X:

--> /X:httpTimeout = "0"
--> /X:imageReadSize = "262144"
--> /X:logFile = "upload.log"
--> /X:logLevel = "verbose"
--> /X:maxNumberOfTermSignals = "5"
--> /X:maxRedirects = "256"
--> /X:maximalDeltaConfSize = "8"
--> /X:maximalDeltaTreeSize = "6"
--> /X:progressSmoothing = "60"
--> /X:useMacNaming = "true"
--> /X:vCloudEnableGuestCustomization = "false"
--> /X:vCloudKeepTemplate = "true"
--> /X:vCloudTimeout = "3600"
--> /X:vimSessionTimeout = "600"

Note: I would not recommend tweaking the other options as the defaults should be sufficient, but logging to a file or upping the verbosity can be useful for troubleshooting

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Categories // Automation, OVFTool Tags // debug, log, ovf, ovftool

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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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