VMware OVF Tool Release Notes

Contents

• About the OVF Tool
• Before You Begin
• What's New?
• Compatibility Notices
• Resolved Issues
• Known Issues and Workarounds

About the OVF Tool

The OVF Tool 4.6.2 is released with vSphere 8.0 U2. The previous OVF Tool 4.6.0 was released with vSphere 8.0 U1.

VMware OVF Tool is a command-line utility that allows import and export of OVF packages to and from virtual machines running on VMware virtualization platforms. OVF Tool gets called internally by many VMware products.

Before You Begin

You can download the OVF Tool for installation on Windows 64-bit or 32-bit, Linux 64-bit or 32-bit, and MacOS 64-bit. The OVF Tool landing page provides a link to the downloads for each release.

OVF Tool 4.6.2 supports the following operating systems:

• Windows 11 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64)
• Windows 10 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64)
• Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1, 32-bit and 64-bit
• Windows Server 2022, 2019, 2016, and 2012 R2
• MacOS versions including 12 Monterey and 13 Ventura
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) recent releases
• Recent releases of CentOS and Fedora
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) recent releases
• Ubuntu Linux and variants, recent releases
• VMware Photon OS and Oracle Linux

Support for vCloud Director (VCD) 10.4.1 has been added. OVF Tool 4.6.0 was tested with VCD 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4.

What's New?

These constituent open source components were upgraded: openssl to version 1.0.2zh.14260, curl to 8.1.2.9481, zlib to 1.2.13.6986, and c-ares DNS to 1.19.0.4101.

New: OVF support for SPBM storage profiles. When exporting a VM to OVF, vSphere extracts storage policy fields and adds them, for both disks and VM home, to the StorageGroupSection. When importing or deploying an OVF, storage profiles are preserved and OVF Tool checks to avoid duplicates. Previously when customers exported a VM to OVF twice, the second export did not import or deploy due to storage profile confusion, and this error message appeared: “Multiple sections of type StorageSection (Storage policy group reference) not allowed.” The workaround with older OVF Tool was to import or deploy with PowerCLI instead of the vSphere Client UI.

SPBM identifiers in the vSphere inventory. If an SPBM identifier is not present in the vSphere inventory, it is ignored during OVF deployment. For example, if the OVF contains BootOrderSection but this is not in the inventory, the OVF import or re-import may fail with error message such as “A specified parameter was not correct: Profile ProfileId not found.” The solution for such failures is adding to the vSphere inventory important SPBM identifiers that appear in error messages, or removing non-inventoried items such as BootOrderSection from the OVF.

For a summary of new features in the previous 4.6.0 release, see the OVF Tool 4.6.0 Release Notes.

Compatibility Notices

When customers try to install vCenter Server from a browser on MacOS 10.15 Catalina, MacOS 11.x Big Sur, MacOS 12 Monterey, or MacOS 13 Ventura, a popup dialog appears saying “vcsa-deploy.bin cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified” and installation fails with error “ovftool cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.” This is due to greater security in MacOS and OVF Tool not being notarized for Apple. See KB 79416 for workarounds.

Resolved Issues

These issues were fixed in OVF Tool 4.6.2:

• Better resiliancy for massive deployments.

  When thousands of VMs are deployed from OVF in a short time period, OVF Tool occasionally throws a ManagedObjectNotFound error. This is caused by a VM disappearing from the inventory during deployment. In this release, OVF Tool ignores the ManagedObjectNotFound exception and proceeds without exiting. If important, you can search logs afterwards to determine which VM deployments failed.

• No waiting for non-existent task to complete.

  During smoke testing, it was determined that ESXi hosts sometimes returned the wrong task in response to a GetRecentTask request. This was observed on deployments of embedded ESXi VMs. Possibly the wrong task was returned because the requested task had completed. In this release, OVF Tool checks the task name to be sure it's the right one. If not OVF Tool continues without calling WaitForTask and eventually marks the task Complete.

• More convenient debugging with ConfigFile logging.

  Added a new vmxFromConfigFile option to extract ConfigInfo from a live VM, convert it to VMX using ConvertConfigInfoToVmx, and save results in a specified file. For example:

  ovftool --X:vmxFromConfigFile=vmxConfigOut.log vi://[email protected]:test.example.vmware.com//vm/TestVM2
  

• OVF Tool support for virtual TPM on hosted platforms.

  For hosted platforms VMware Fusion and Workstation, OVF Tool's probe function was extended to detect the vtpm flag, which indicates that the VM supports virtual TPM (trusted platform module). OVF Tool was also changed to not add vtpm.present flag when the VM does not contain or cannot handle a virtual TPM. These changes prevent boot issues and improve security.

Known Issues and Workarounds

These issues were reported by customers or discovered during testing:

• New: ResourcePool import fails with OVF reference to empty storage policy.

  When an OVF contains both StorageGroupSection and BootOrderSection, deployment with ResourcePool.ImportVApp fails, because even a valid storage policy is converted to profileId = "" (empty string). The workaround is to manually remove BootOrderSection from the OVF, if StorageGroupSection is valid, or instead set EmptyProfileSpec for the disk.

• OVF Tool interaction with Apple Silicon.

  The MacOS 64-bit binary extracted from Zip runs on ARM processors (M1 and M2) when the Rosetta2 emulator is already installed. OVF Tool export might have difficulties with certain hardware specifics, but any such issues have not been fully characterized.

• Network services library required.

  OVF Tool calls the network services library libnsl but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and Fedora 27 removed this library. Export fails and message “export failed: unknown error” appears. The solution is to install libnsl and restart the Linux machine, as detailed in VMware KB 89515.