Error deploying Novell ZEN Appliance

[Snarls]

Hi all,

This is my first post and I am trying to educate myself as quickly as possible with with ESXi 5 Hypervisor and the VSphere Client. I have built (as a stop gap solution before a new server purchase) a Dell Vostro 460 with 8GB RAM and a i7 2600 CPU. I have installed ESXi 5 HV and configured it ok. I have downloaded from Novell the Zen 11 Appliance ova file (7GB). In VSphere, I go to File and click on Deploy OVF Template. I browse to the OVA file which is on my laptop's C drive and click next. I choose Thick Provision (Lazy Zeroed) and click next and then Finish.

I then get the following error:

I have tried unpacking the ova file down to the vmdk file but I don't know how to get it going. Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you kindly.

[Snarls]

OK further to this. I have managed to Deploy the OVA file to an older machine running ESXi 4.1. That machine cannot run the ZEN Appliance though because the CPUs in it don't have VT and so can't run 64 bit guests. I will need to move the appliance from the older machine running ESXi 4.1 to the Dell PC running ESXi 5.

I do not understand at this point why I couldn't deploy the OVA file to ESXi 5 but can to ESXi 4. Is this because the OVA file was put together by Novell using something that ESXi 5 is not compatible with?

[Snarls]

OK I've managed to get the ZEN Appliance running. I had to browse the datastore and copy it down to my laptop from the ESXi 4 machine and then upload the files to the ESXi 5 PC. Must just be some incompatibility between certain OVA files and version 5 meaning that I couldn't just do the deployment the easy way...

[saltnz]

Novell's interpretation of a Virtual appliance is a bit loose.

In future you could try using the vmkfstools and that should sort you out.  However you must remember to use the absolute path never relative to the directory you are in.

IE vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/sourceDatastore......(original disk file) /vmfs/volumes/targetDatastore......target.vmdk -d thin