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Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 2

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In the previous article, we reviewed the concepts and basic approach to building your own VMware Virtual Appliance (OVF/OVA). In Part 2, we are now going to take a look at a reference implementation for building a Linux VA using VMware PhotonOS. Although I am using PhotonOS as the guest, you can apply these same techniques to any other Linux distribution of your choice.

Step 1 - Create a new VM in vCenter Server and then install PhotonOS using the ISO format. Once you have completed the OS installation, you may want to apply any patches or packages that you want included as part of your VA. Once that is done, go ahead and shut down the VM.

Step 2 - Select the VM in the vSphere Inventory and then click on Configure->vApp and then check the Enable vApp Options. Once enabled, select OVF environment for the IP allocation scheme. In the OVF Details tab, select VMware Tools for the OVF environment transport. (Optionally) You can specify some additional metadata including appliance name and URLs to help others who maybe consuming your VA once it has been exported to an OVF/OVA.

Step 3 - Next, add the following 6 OVF properties which will be used as input to configure networking within PhotonOS. Click Add and provide a Label, Key and optional Category.

Label Key Category
Hostname guestinfo.hostname Networking
IP Address guestinfo.ipaddress Networking
Netmask guestinfo.netmask Networking
Gateway guestinfo.gateway Networking
DNS Server guestinfo.dns Networking
DNS Domain guestinfo.domain Networking


Step 4 - Power back on the VM and once it is available on the network (assuming DHCP), download and copy the sample first boot script rc.local to /etc/rc.d/rc.local. This script is where all the magic happens and will process the OVF property input and then configure the network settings. Right now it assumes these fields are optional, meaning if they left blank, it will default the system to DHCP. If you provide all input properties, then it will go ahead and configure a static network address.

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Building your own Virtual Appliances using OVF properties Part 1

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This has been a topic I have been wanting to write about for quite some time, especially as I get asked about this on fairly regular basis from both partners and customers. I normally point folks over to our official Virtual Appliance (VA) authoring tool, VMware Studio which includes a number of development resources to help get started. Studio is used by many of our partners when creating their VA offerings, although it may not be the easiest thing to get started with, it does provide a complete end-to-end solution.

Most recently, I found myself building out a couple of VAs for my own day to day use, including a custom PhotonOS OVA that allows me to configure a static network address during deployment through the use of custom OVF properties. The official PhotonOS OVA that VMware ships does not provide this option and automatically defaults to DHCP. If you want to setup a static IP Address, you would need to first deploy the VM and then login to the console or SSH (if you have DHCP enabled) and then manually update the networking settings.


For my use case, Studio was going to be overkill and not to mention it may not even support PhotonOS or other modern OSes in general. However, everything that is needed to build your own VA is actually available right in vCenter Server. This was the perfect opportunity and excuse for me to finally document *my* process, in case it can help others wanting to do the same, especially for a home lab setup. In Part 1, I will take you through the two important concepts of building your own VA and then in Part 2 and Part 3, we will take a look at building both a Linux and Windows VA. I will also publish a reference Linux and Windows implementation so that you can use that as a basis to build your own VA, which is not limited to just Linux or Windows, it can be ANY GuestOS that vSphere supports.

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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)

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!

Updating OVF properties for a VM using vSphere API and PowerCLI 

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Deploying a new OVA/OVF containing OVF properties that need to be configured is super easy using PowerCLI's Get-OvfConfiguration and Import-VApp cmdlets. Many examples can be found online including the PowerCLI Deployment Github repository.

However, once an OVA/OVF has been deployed and running as a standard Virtual Machine, I found there were no out of the box cmdlets for manipulating the OVF properties for a VM as shown in the screenshot below.


Online searches also did not yield any results and hence the opopournity and article 🙂

Just like any VM reconfiguration, you will need to use the vSphere API ReconfigVM_Task() and to update various OVF settings for a VM, you will need to pass in VAppConfigSpec along with a VAppPropertySpec containing the individual OVF property values to update.

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Native OVF support for Fusion/Workstation 2017 Tech Preview 

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The VMware Fusion and Workstation team just released their 2017 Tech Preview releases and there is a ton of new and awesome capabilities which you can read more about here and here. One of the exciting new features, which I was very fortunate to have been involved with is finally here, native OVF property support! Although customers have had the ability to import OVF/OVAs for some time now, if they included OVF properties, they would be ignored and often times this would result in a failed deployment as those properties are required for the initial setup.

A great example of this is trying to run the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) on either Fusion or Workstation. Today, the only workaround is to manually edit the VMX file and supplying the correct OVF properties which I have blogged about here. With the latest TP release of Fusion/Workstation, when you import an OVF/OVA that contains OVF properties, the UI will automatically render the required information directly into the UI without needing users to manually touch the VMX files.

Here is a screenshot of deploying the latest VCSA 6.5d OVA (jump to bottom for some additional VCSA tidbits when deploying to Fusion/Workstation):

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Default hashing algorithm changed in OVFTool 4.2 preventing OVF/OVA import using vSphere C# Client

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After upgrading my home lab recently to vSphere 6.5, I also updated some of the related utilities such as the various SDKs and CLIs. One of the CLIs that I had updated was the latest version of OVFTool which is now at 4.2. I use OVFTool extensively to automate various Virtual Machine deployments (import/export). While testing out a new OVA that I had been working on, I needed to verify that it also worked with previous release of vSphere like vSphere 6.0 Update 2. I happen to have the vSphere C# Client open and connected to a vCenter Server and when I tried to import the newly created OVA, but it failed with the following error message:

The following manifest file entry(line1) is invalid: SHA256

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-7-37-47-am
I was pretty surprised by this since I went through this exact same workflow a couple of days ago without any problems. The only change that had happened was OVFTool and error seems to indicate an issue with the hashing algorithm. I ran OVFTool again using just the --help option to check what the default SHA hashing algorithm was, it was SHA256. I then compared that to an older version of OVFTool and it looks like the default had changed from SHA1 to SHA256.

From a security standpoint, this is a positive change as SHA1 is no longer considered a secure hashing algorithm and a stronger version should be used. It also turns out that the vSphere C# Client can only support SHA1 which is why I received the error after upgrading to the new version of OVFTool. Luckily, this is NOT a problem when using the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere HTML5 Client and only affects the vSphere C# Client. If you do need to use the vSphere C# Client for importing OVF/OVAs exported from the latest version of OVFTool, the workaround is quite simple, just override the default hashing algorithim when exporting by adding the additional CLI option:

--shaAlgorithm=sha1