I recently answered, what I thought was pretty straight forward question on the VMTN forums about whether it was possible to to deploy an OVA directly onto an ESXi host without leveraging remote tools such as the vSphere Client or the The response that I provided was, no it was not possible to deploy an OVF/OVA within the ESXi Shell and recommended the user to take a look at the vSphere Client or the ovftool. For whatever reason, my brain decided to ponder about this specific question over the weekend (even though I had answered dozen or so questions earlier in the week) and came up an idea that could make this work.

As many of you know, I am a big fan of the ovftool and I have written several articles about the tool such as and. I wanted to see if I could get the ovftool to run in the ESXi Shell as all the necessary libraries and required packages are all self contained within /usr/lib/vmware-ovftool directory. Rene Aubry Refuges Zip. If this works, it would allow a user to deploy a VM from an OVF or OVA format within the ESXi Shell and would not require a remote system which is great for kickstart deployments or ISO installations. As you probably have guessed, I was able to get this to work 🙂 Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please test this in a lab before deploying on production systems. Before you begin, you will need to get the ovftool installed on an existing Linux system, you can use vMA for your convenience. Next, you will need to use the scp command to copy the entire /usr/lib/vmware-ovftool directory onto an ESXi host.

Ensure you place the contents on either a shared or local datastore as the size of the ovftool content is quite large (~119 MB). In this example, I am scp'ing the ovftool directory to a local VMFS datastore (/vmfs/volumes/datastore1) scp -r /usr/lib/vmware-ovftool/:/vmfs/volumes/datastore1 Once you have successfully copied the ovftool directory over to your ESXi host, you will need to make a small tweak to the file located in /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/vmware-ovftool/ovftool (shell script that calls the ovftool binary). You will need to modify the the first line using the vi editor from #! Dc Comics Ita. /bin/bash to #!/bin/sh as ESXi does not recognize the bash shell. You are now ready to copy an OVF or OVA to your ESXi host which should also reside within a shared or local datastore. In this example, I uploaded a SLES OVF to the same datastore which contains the ovftool as seen below from the datastore browser. We can see that is pretty easy to deploy an OVF or OVA from within the ESXi Shell, but what about unattended installations such as ESXi?

Download VMware vSphere with Operations Management. Combine the world’s leading virtualization platform with best in class management capabilities, enabling users. VMware OVF Tool is an utility that supports importing & exporting of OVF packs 1. 3.5.0 VMware, Inc. Review Comments Questions &. How to deploy and run the VSAN 6.1 Witness Virtual Appliance on VMware Fusion & Workstation? How to deploy. 0 using OVFtool. As the older ovftool 3.5.0 is not. VMware is the global leader in virtualization software, providing desktop and server virtualization products for virtual infrastructure solutions.