A few days ago i was helping a customer building a vSphere 5.5 test environment in a vCloud Director (vCD) version 5.1.2 environment. My customer has changed strategy and will start using the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) instead of the Windows based vCenter Server version. I’ll not discuss the underlying cause for their decision in this blog.
The vCenter Server Appliance is delivered in the OVA format and vCD does not support uploading this format to the Organization Virtual Datacenter (Org vDC) catalog.
This can easily be verified by accessing the vCD Java based upload applet via the vCD UI -> Org vDC -> Catalogs -> Media and clicking the Browse button
The browse window lists the file extensions available, .ovf, .iso and .flp to upload to vCD.
Two ways to work around this includes:
- Import the vCSA to the vSphere environment and then import it from the vSphere environment to the vCD.
- Import the vCSA to any vSphere environment, export it as an OVF file and import it to vCD.
There is however another possibility which is were useful if you do not have access to the vSphere environment backing the vCD environment or to another vSphere environment.
You can use the VMware OVF Tool application which can be downloaded here. I have never used it before but this command based tool is really simple to use. I installed it to my MacBook and tried two different scenarios:
1, Upload the vCSA OVA file to vCD
This is the command syntax for uploading an OVA file to vCD:
ovftool file_to_upload “vcloud://USER:PASSWORD@vCD_IP-or-VCD_FQDN:443?org=ORGANIZATION&vappTemplate=VAPPTEMPLATE-to-create&catalog=CATALOG-where-you-will-upload-the-OVA&vdc=your-OrgVDC”
Below is the exact syntax i used when uploading the VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.5.0.5100-1312297_OVF10.ova file and remember to change the red marked text to your own values:
/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/VMware OVF Tool/ovftool –allowExtraConfig –X:logFile=vCD-upload.log –X:logLevel=verbose –overwrite –acceptAllEulas /Users/user1a/Resources/VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.5.0.5100-1312297_OVF10.ova “vcloud://orgadmin:not_secret_passwd-2013@myvcd01.customer.local:443?org=vcdx56&vappTemplate=vSphere-5.5-01&catalog=vcdx56-Catalog&vdc=vcdx56 vDC“
2, Convert the vCSA OVA file to an OVF file and upload the vCSA OVF to vCD using the vCD Java based upload applet.
This is the command syntax for converting an OVA file to an OVF file:
ovftool OVA-file OVF-file
Below is the exact syntax i used when converting the VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.5.0.5100-1312297_OVF10.ova to an VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.5.0.5100-1312297_OVF10.ovf file:
/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/VMware OVF Tool/ovftool /Users/User1/Resources/VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.5.0.5100-1312297_OVF10.ova /Users/User1/Resources/VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.5.0.5100-1312297_OVF10.ovf
When finished you just need to use the vCD Java based applet and upload the file:
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December 1, 2013 at 8:40 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
[…] (vCSA). To upload OVA files to vCD catalog i used the instruction published in my blog post here. Next thing i created the vApp […]