The only solution I've found for running ovftool on ESXi 5.x is adding it to the ESXi boot image at (ESXi) installation using this article from Micheal Lustfield. It may not be relevant for your environment if you cannot reinstall ESXi but it works well for me for our Solutions Lab. The entire article provides more background.
Using this I can then deploy an OVA as part of the Kickstart firstboot section (example below, ovftool 4.0 only).
Travis
Creating Our Customizations: The OVF
Notice in the above, I expect /ovf to exist. We're about to make it so! First we need to aquire ovftools. The VMware website has an ovftool download.
Download the 64bit version and install it.
Now we need to make /ovf and the directories inside of it.
mkdir /tmp/ovf mkdir /tmp/ovf/tools mkdir /tmp/ovf/files
Take the installed ovftools and stick them in the tools directory.
rsync -au /usr/lib/vmware-ovftool/* /tmp/ovf/tools/ sed -i 's/bash/sh/' /tmp/ovf/tools/ovftool
We leave an empty files directory. This is where the post install part of the kickstart file will dump the OVA files.
Now we need to turn the ovf directory into ovf-00.t00.
cd /tmp tar cf ovf.tar ovf gzip -9 ovf.tar mv ovf.tar.gz /mnt/usb/ovf-00.t00
Completely Automated ESXi Deployment - Michael Lustfield
Kickstart firstboot example:
#Import VCSA VM from local datastore, complete base network configuration
/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ovf/tools/ovftool --acceptAllEulas --skipManifestCheck --noSSLVerify --diskMode=thin --name=den-VC01 --X:injectOvfEnv --powerOn --prop:vami.hostname=den-VC01.orange.corp --prop:vami.DNS.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=172.17.2.1 --prop:vami.ip0.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=172.17.2.11 --prop:vami.netmask0.VMware_vCenter_Server_Appliance=255.255.255.0 /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ovf/files/VCSA-5.5.ova "vi://root:password@172.17.17.17"
