ovftool - Defining the 'Product', 'Version' and 'Vendor'?

[fwragge]

Hi,

Am trying to export an ova from a VM using ovftool.  Something along the lines of...

ovftool --prop:Version=100 --privateKey=./id_rsa.pem --eula@=./eula.txt vi://root:mypass@myserver.mydomain.com/myVM ./myOVA.ova

Everything looks good except that I haven't been able to define the 'Product', 'Version' and 'Vendor'  that appears in the initial dialog when customers deploy the template into a running ESX / vCenter instance.

Assume this must be a v common question but have not found how this might be done from the ovftool user guide (http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/ovf301/ovftool-301-userguide.pdf) or the VMware communities.  Closest I've found is http://communities.vmware.com/thread/328504 which indicates that defining a vCenter vApp allow configurable properties to be set.

Is there any way to define these parameters via ovftool?  If not, is there a way to hack the .ova manually to define them?

Thanks in advance,

Frank.

[MikeDrangula]

I don't know if there is a way to do this with ovftool or not but I do know how to hack the .ova.

A .ova is simply a tarball. You can unpack it into the current directory by doing tar xf foobar.ova on a Linux system. There are now a number of files in the current directory along with the .ova. One of them will be called foobar.ovf. This is an XML file that completely describes the .ova. Inside the <Product Section> of the .ovf you can define Product, Version and Vendor as follows:

<ProductSection>
      <Product>Foobar</Product>
      <Vendor>Foobar LLC</Vendor>
      <Version>1.0.0</Version>

      ...
</ProductSection>

Recreate the .ova this way:

ovftool --skipManifestCheck --overwrite --name="Foobar" ./foobar.ovf ./foobar.ova

YMMV

MikeD

[fwragge]

Thanks Mike!