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hemantha2011101
Contributor
Contributor

Properties lost when deployed a VM and exported it to OVF

Hi,

I have built a VM, using VMware Studio in OVA format. I defined some custom OVF environment properties in it.

After I built the VM, I opened the .OVF file to see the property values are appeared correctly. They look like the below

<ProductSection ovf:required="false">
      <Info>VM ISV branding information</Info>
      <Product>xxxxxxxxx</Product>
      <Vendor> xxxxxxxxx , Inc.</Vendor>
      <Version>x.x.x.x</Version>
      <FullVersion>x.x.x.x alpha</FullVersion>

</ProductSection>

I deployed this OVF to a ESXi 4.0 server. Later exported the same VM to OVF format using OVFTool, using the command line

ovftool.exe vi://root:xxxxxxxxxxx@IP/vmname  "d:\Virtual Machines\imported-OVF\newVM.ovf"

After the export, I opened the newVM.OVF file and found that the properties (like product, vendor, version etc.) are not retained.

What could be the issue. Please suggest.

--Hemanth

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3 Replies
continuum
Immortal
Immortal

Why are you surprised ?

OVF-tool reads the vmx-file of the VM you specify.

It then obscures those values and ignores others and writes the results into a xml-file.

Those details you are missing never made it into the vmx-file - so they can not reappear all by itself.


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

hemantha2011101
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks. Now it's clear to me why the custom properties disappeared from OVF file.

That means the custom properties won't go to the VM level. Right ?

Is there any way, we can retain the custom properties of the OVF, when the VM deployed multiple times. (i.e. depolyed and again exported), on ESXi servers? OR are the proeperties saved in any other file ? ( so that we can recover from such file later)

--Hemanth

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

> I have built a VM, using VMware Studio in OVA format.

Hmmmm . ... you do not built VMs when you create OVA packages.
You take an existing VM and
1. read the existing VM-specs from the vmx-file and write a simplified summary into a xml-file - extension .ovf
2. convert the existing vmdks into streamoptimized format
3. optionally you can configure what to display in ViClient when this tar archive is opened for the first time

This format was not invented to be used more than once.

If you want to be sure that your users get exactly the VM that you made - distribute the vmx-file plus a vmdk.

If displaying your information is the deciding factor keep the ovf-file and distribute it along with updated versions of the vmdk.


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...