How to install OVFTOOL on ESXi 6.7

[MarkRandolph]

I have downloaded and place the Linux file VMware-ovftool-4.4.0-15722219-lin.x86_64.bundle on ESXi but cannot install.

I want to run the OVF tool on the ESXi server onto a datastore. It's a 1-2 TB file to package up.

The OVFtool on any external machine just cannot do this process.

Can someone help?

[peetz]

Hello Mark,

contrary to popular belief ESXi is *not* based on Linux, so you cannot just install and run a random Linux software package in the ESXi shell.

However, ESXi shares common C libraries with Linux/Unix and understands the binary executable format that is also used by Linux, and this is why you can execute *some* Linux binaries inside the ESXi shell, provided that they have been statically linked with all libraries that are not present in ESXi.

William Lam has described in this old blog post, how you can possibly get the Linux version of ovftool to run in ESXi: https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/05/how-to-deploy-ovfova-in-esxi-shell.html

But no guarantee that this still works with recent ESXi (and ovftool) versions...

The first question that came to my mind was: Why would you want to do this, what are you trying to achieve? Whatever you want to do there is almost always a way to do this with *supported* tools in a *supported* way. It's never a good idea to run something inside the ESXi shell which does not originally belong there (i.e. was provided by VMware or through 3rd party certified ESXi software packages).

- Andreas

[dgold]

what you to do is to extract the bundle on a linux system and then copy it to Esx directory and then run it from esx. 

chmod +x VMware-ovftool-4.4.0-15722219-lin.x86_64.bundle

./VMware-ovftool-4.4.0-15722219-lin.x86_64.bundle --extract  tempunpackdirovftool

scp or other methods tempunpackdirovftool/vmware-ovftool/  files/dir  to  Esx folder

before running ovftool on Esx change #!/bin/bash to #!/bin/sh https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/05/how-to-deploy-ovfova-in-esxi-shell.html

That should do it.