VMware OVF Tool Release Notes

What's in the Release Notes

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

About the OVF Tool

OVF Tool 4.4.3 release coincides with vSphere 7.0 Update 3. There was no OVF Tool release with 7.0 Update 2.

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, Mac OS X 64-bit, and ARM 64-bit. The OVF Tool landing page provides a link to the software download group for each release. OVF Tool 4.4.3 supports the same operating systems as OVF Tool 4.4.

What's New?

In this release, Zip archives are provided for Linux 64-bit and 32-bit, as an alternative to the bundle installers. Simply unpack the Zip into a directory and run ovftool from there.

This is an update release of OVF Tool. See resolved issues below

• The OpenSSL library was upgraded to version 1.0.2za
• The Curl library was upgraded to version 7.78.0.7565
• The c-ares DNS library was upgraded to version 1.17.1.3195
• The PNG library was upgraded to version 1.2.59.5014 or 1.6.37.5319
• The expat XML library was upgraded to version 2.4.1.5823
• The Xerces XML parser was upgraded to version 3.2.3.64
• The icu4c Unicode library was upgraded to version 60.2.175

Compatibility Notices

When customers try to install vCenter Server 7.0.x from a browser on MacOS 10.15 Catalina, or Mac OS 11.x Big Sur, 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 4.4.3:

• Chunking feature did not work for NVRAM and image files.

  Customers were unable to export virtual machines with the --chunk parameter because the NVRAM size mistakenly shows as zero (0), causing “Wrong file size specified on OVF descriptor” error. This release fixes functionality of the --chunk option.

These issues were regressions fixed in OVF Tool 4.4.1:

• OVF Tool fails to login when invalid password is used in the locator URL.

  If an invalid password is provided in the locator URL, OVF Tool asks the user to enter a valid password. However OVF Tool did not use this new password provided by the user, resulting in login failure. This issue is fixed in this release. OVF Tool now uses the replacement password that the user supplies.

• During URL encoding OVF Tool mistakenly encoded the username.

  In OVF Tool 4.4.0, an invalid password resulted in the username being encoded along with the password, thereby preventing login to the target VI host. This issue is fixed in this release.

• OVF Tool could crash with no datastore specified.

  When the user did not specify a datastore, OVF Tool should have displayed an error message, but instead it crashed with a segmentation fault. The workaround was to specify the datastore argument. This issue has been fixed in this release.