Wednesday, February 15, 2017

vCenter 6.0 Failed To Deploy .OVF

So today I ran into an issue where I was exporting to template, a Cent7 image from vSphere 5.5 and importing into version 6.0.

I exported successfully enough, which generated three files: cent7-base template.ovf, *.vmdk and *.mf.
I needed to get these files from our ESXi server in-house to the states datacenter across a semi-quick VPN tunnel.  So I was able to browse the datastore in 6.0 and upload the three files from my local machine.

1.58 hours later..


Done.  So feeling good about myself I went to import OVF Template only to have it fail roughly 5 seconds later.  The error was: _deviceimage-0.iso was not found

Puzzled.. wait how the hell was there an iso involv... oh crap.  I forgot to disconnect the pending/failed VMware Tools installer.  So being the curious lad that I am, I (on a guess) tried opening the ovf file using Notepad.. primarily because it was small and I figured it might hold config info.  Boy was I right!  The .ovf file is laid out like an XML.. I found one reference to an iso file.. specifically: vmware.cdrom.iso.  So I removed it and instead placed the following: vmware.cdrom.passthrough which I recalled was an option in the GUI.

Saving the file I re-tried teh import to have it complete successfully!  WOOT.