About This Book

This OVF Tool User’s Guide provides information about how to use VMware® OVF Tool to package virtual machines and vApps into Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard packages.

Revision History

Revision History shows the changes made for various versions of this manual.

Table 1. Revision History
Revision Description
09/2021 Reissued for vSphere 7.0 Update 3.
10/2020 Clarified password percent encoding for Update 1.
04/2020 Updated with new flags and features for vSphere 7.0 release.
04/2019 Clarified OVF Tool with ESXi as target.
05/2018 OVF Tool 4.3.0 User’s Guide. Large upload retry, SHA digest fix, NVM and PMEM, Curl update, better logging, VBS and TPM support.
10/2016 OVF Tool 4.2.0 User’s Guide. New options for SSL version and cipher list, NVRAM support for EFI boot.
02/2016 Mention need for explicit extraConfig flags on ESXi hosts.
03/2015 OVF Tool 4.1.0 User’s Guide. Added DVS port group, and --proxy option for vSphere or vCloud.
12/2014 Increased Open SSL compatibility version to 1.0.1j. See http://www.openssl.org/news/vulnerabilities.html.
10/2014 OVF Tool 4.0.0 User’s Guide. Added --allowAllExtraConfig and --decodeBase64 command line options.
06/2014 OVF Tool 3.5.2 User’s Guide. Increased security for Open SSL.
04/2014 OVF Tool 3.5.1 User’s Guide.
08/2013 OVF Tool 3.5.0 User’s Guide. Includes new command line options.
08/2012 OVF Tool 3.0.1 User’s Guide.
08/2011 OVF Tool 2.1 User’s Guide.
06/2010 OVF Tool 2.0.1 Guide.
05/2009 OVF Tool 1.0 Guide.

Intended Audience

This book is intended for anyone who needs to convert an OVF package to a virtual machine, or a virtual machine to an OVF package. Users typically include: system administrators, software developers, QA engineers, and anyone who need to package or unpackage virtual machines using open industry standards.

Document Feedback

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