I am attempting to determine an easy method to deploy .OVA templates for quick provisioning/deployment of VM's.
I have built VM baselines using a development vSphere cluster and exported the VM to .OVA using vSphere client. Those .OVA files reside on a Linux fileserver with ovftool installed on the system and network access to future ESXi and/or vSphere clusters.
Is it possible to 'deploy' the .OVA template from the Linux fileserver directly to a remote ESXi host's datastore and/or vSphere cluster datastore? I cant get it to work.
My OVA file:
[root@centos_lab1 u0]# ls -lha
total 5.9G
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 4.0K Jun 28 08:48 .
dr-xr-xr-x. 24 root root 4.0K Jun 25 11:30 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5.9G Jun 24 10:01 test.ova
Attempting to deploy to ESXi host:
[root@centos_lab1 u0]# ovftool test.ova vi://root:test123@172.16.16.81
Opening OVA source: test.ova
Opening VI target: vi://root@172.16.16.81:443/
Error: No target datastore specified. Possible completions:
iSCSI-Large
ESX1_local_datastore
iSCSI-Equallogic
fusionio
Super_ISO
Completed with errors
[root@centos_lab1 u0]# ovftool test.ova vi://root:test123@172.16.16.81/iSCSI-Equallogic/
Opening OVA source: test.ova
Error: Locator does not refer to an object: vi://root@172.16.16.81:443ha-datacenter/host/esx1.lab.q9.com/Resources/iSCSI-Equallogic/
Completed with errors
Any idea what I am doing wrong here? Is what I am trying to do even possible with ovftool?
