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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!

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

OVF Runtime Environment

06.11.2012 by William Lam // 36 Comments

I recently noticed a trend of questions from various users about extracting specific bits of information such as the version of ESXi that's running or the MoRef ID of the VM, all while within the guestOS. I had already written an article about this topic awhile back called How to extract host information from within a VM? but it seems like there is still a continued interest to easily obtain this information about the underlying vSphere infrastructure from within the guestOS.

I came across another method while researching a different topic which is to use the vApp property of a VM called the OVF runtime environment. This is a feature that has been around since the early days of vSphere 4.x, if not earlier which provides a mechanism to retrieve some of this information as well as custom properties. The OVF feature provides users with the capability to pass in any type of metadata information such as application start up parameters, network configuration, password management, etc. directly into the guestOS for flexible guest customization.

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Categories // Automation, OVFTool, vSphere Tags // guestinfo, ovf, ovfenv, vmtoolsd, vmware tools

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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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