What is "Export to OVF..." doing?

[mmohp]

To deploy a VM created with VMware Workstation to an ESXi server one first needs to create a .ovf file.

For this Workstation offers the File => Export to OVF command. But what is this command actually doing???

I just had to create two such files (for two VMs of size 15 GB and 20 GB, resp.) and this took FOREVER!, i.e. >1.5 hours!

But what really puzzled me in the end: the resulting .ovf files are both 6KB large (6 kilobytes!).

How can creating a 6 KB file take >40 minutes? What info does this thing have to find or extract to create these files? What is this command doing all that time?

Michael

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - OVF stands for a Open Virtualization Format - a format to move virtual machines between different virtual environments - the OVF file you are looking at is really the meta data file about the OVF - there should also have been files equaling in size to the data that is tored in the VM - 

[mmohp]

Ah - yes - you are right! There is a .vmdk file, that's about half the size of all the previous VM files together.

I had "overlooked" that, since I had placed it into the same directory as a few other large files.

Still, taking pretty long - isn't it? Is it compressing that stuff or omitting unused virtual disk and/or memory blocks or such?

Michael

[weinstein5]

I believe tehre is some compression being done as well as cleaning up of white space -