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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

 

Quick Tip - OVFTool 4.3 now supports vCPU & memory customization during deployment

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In addition to adding vSphere 6.7 support and a few security enhancements (more details in the release notes), the latest OVFTool 4.3 release has also been enhanced to support customizing either vCPU and/or Memory from the default configurations when deploying an OVF/OVA.

Historically, it was only possible to modify these values if you were deploying to a vCloud Director endpoint using either --numberOfCpus or --memorySize. When deploying to a vSphere endpoint, these settings were not applicable and users would need to perform an additional operation calling into the vSphere API using whatever automation tool of choice to reconfigure the VM after deployment. It was not the end of the world but also not ideal if you simply wanted to make a minor modification to the default OVF/OVA you were deploying. I definitely ran into this a few times where having this functionality would have been very useful and I know number of customers have also shared simliar feedback in the past.

I had asked whether it was possible to support this use case and it looks like we already had an internal feature request added to the OVFTool backlog and with some additional customer feedback, we were also able to get this enhancement added to the latest release.

The existing --numberOfCpus and --memorySize accepts a VM Identifier (usually the name) followed by the value, for example

--numberOfCpus:Foo=4

The VM Identifier is to help with vApp deployments where you may have an OVF/OVA which is composed of multiple VMs of which you would like to customize each VM with different values. To ensure we do not break backwards compatibility, this pattern has also been extended when deploying to a vSphere endpoint. Having said that, most customers that I have talked to who use OVFTool generally deploy an OVF/OVA that is comprised of a single VM. In this case, rather than specifying the name of the VM again which is derived from --name property, you can simply use the wildcard asterisk (*) to simply apply it to all VMs within the OVF/OVA.

Here is an example of deploying a PhotonOS OVA which is configured with a default of 1 vCPU and 2GB memory and as part of our deployment using OVFTool, we will increase both vCPU to 2 and memory to 4GB:

ovftool --acceptAllEulas --name=Foo --numberOfCpus:'*'=2 --memorySize:'*'=4096 photon-custom-hw11-2.0-304b817.ova 'vi://*protected email*@192.168.30.200/VSAN-Datacenter/host/VSAN-Cluster'

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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