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Slick way of deploying OVF/OVA directly to ESXi & vCenter Server using govc CLI

04.08.2016 by William Lam // 9 Comments

I have been meaning to write about this neat little feature that was added to the govc CLI late last year that allows you to easily deploy any OVF/OVA without the need of ovftool. You might ask, why not use ovftool? Well, if you just need to perform a very basic OVF/OVA deploy and prefer not to install anything on your desktop, this can be a nice alternative. govc is provided as a simple binary that is platform agnostic and supports Windows, Linux & Mac OS X. govc is built using govmomi which is also known as the vSphere SDK for Go and this also means you can consume this capablitity beyond just the CLI but also programmatically if you wish. Obviously, the CLI is the easiest method which I will demonstrate below.

Just to be clear, there is still a huge amount of value in using ovftool as it contains a large mount of functionality that is not found any where else. It is still the recommended tool for deploying OVF/OVA across all VMware based Hypervisors and is extensively used by other VMware's products for general OVF/OVA deployment.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, Cloud Native, ESXi, vSphere Tags // govc, govmomi, injectOvfEnv, ova, ovf, vSphere API

Quick Tip - Handy ovftool 4.0 advanced options

07.01.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I recently had a need to deploy an OVA using ovftool on a Windows desktop and I ran into the following error:

Error: Could not lookup host: root

Since the environment I was deploying to did not have DNS, the failed hostname lookup was expected. This was pretty annoying with previous releases of ovftool but it looks like with the latest 4.0 version, there is a new advanced option called --X:disableHostnameResolve that would allow you to disable this check. Using the new version of ovftool and the advanced option, I was able to bypass the check and deploy the OVA.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, Fusion, OVFTool, vSphere, Workstation Tags // injectOvfEnv, ovftool

An alternate way to inject OVF properties when deploying virtual appliances directly onto ESXi

06.16.2014 by William Lam // 13 Comments

I recently published an article demonstrating how to inject OVF properties into the VCSA and other virtual appliances when deploying directly onto ESXi using an unreleased version of ovftool (4.0). A fellow reader by the name of VirtualJMills, as he is known on Twitter left an interesting comment using an alternate solution which I thought was actually pretty clever!

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi, OVFTool, VCSA Tags // ESXi, guestinfo.ovfEnv, injectOvfEnv, ova, ovf, ovfenv, ovftool, VCSA, vcva

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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