Importing an OVA file into VMWare

What is an OVA File?

OVA files are Open Virtual Appliance files used for packaging and distributing virtual machines. They simplify the deployment process by containing all necessary files, such as disk images and configuration data, in a single archive. If you compare this to building your own virtual machine, it can take some reading, or trial and error, to get a virtual environment up and running, whereas the .OVA file is something you import into your hypervisor, fire it up and off you go.

Standard file format?

The OVA standard is a secure open standard, though it is mostly used with Oracle Virtual Box. There’s not a lot wrong with Oracle Virtual Box, I mean it has a dog ugly user interface but most people aren’t looking at the hypervisor, they’re looking at the virtual machine(s), so we can let that slide.

As an open ‘standard’ file format, it should be easy to open this type of file in other hypervisors, however, I rarely find it to be as easy to open an .OVA file in VMWare or Windows Hyper-V compared to just using Virtual Box, but, I often don’t like to work with Virtual Box as I find it trips me up a bit more often than working with VMWare Workstation for example. I can’t talk too much about the Windows Hyper-V as I use that even less often than I use Virtual Box…

Some .OVA files can be opened easily from within VMWare workstation, just click File, Open and select the .ova file, in some cases, you will have no issue, in some cases you get a warning that the import failed and an option to retry using a more relaxed format known as ovf.

NB: a warning is not always a fail, often clicking retry will successfully import the file for you, but if it does not, then we need to convert the file outside of the VMWare workstation.

What is the OVA file?

An OVA file is basically a single-file which contains the complete package of a Virtual Machine, including its disk images and configuration settings, all bundled together for easier transfer and deployment. It all sounds great, but considering it is an open format, it isn’t fully embraced by the big players.

Opening an OVA file

To open an OVA file in Virtual Box is as easy as clicking on File and selecting Import a virtual machine. There may be some configuration required, such as mapping shared space to suit your requirements and perhaps modifying graphics, RAM and CPU settings, but on the whole, this is a simple activity.

Opening the same file in VMWare Workstation requires a bit more effort, not loads, but some. Oh and did I mention I always forget the steps, hence the blog post, so I can find the steps later.

VMWare OVF Tool

This sub-heading is a challenge in itself sometimes, finding things to download on the VMWare site is a different challenge since being bought by Broadcom, I can’t add a link or provide instructions because Broadcom will surely reorganise things again next week and the links or instructions will be invalid, check the internet, you’ll find tons of dead links to OVF Tool. I know that doesn’t help, but all I can say is that you create a Broadcom account and search in there, that is the route of least pain.

NB: The less nice parts of the internet know that Broadcom have made this difficult and there are some dodgy versions of the VMWare Tools installer out there, try to avoid this, there is huge risk to downloading something like this from an unofficial source.

Possible link: OVF Tool - latest requires a Broadcom account.

Using the VMWare OVF Tool

Assuming you have an application installed, how to use it…

I am working on a Windows box at the moment, so my examples are from the Windows OS, but I believe the syntax is basically the same regardless of the host.

For reference, my parameters are as follows:

• VMWare Workstation is installed on my C: drive
  • PATH= C:\Program Files (x86)\VMWare
• OVF Tool is a sub folder, I suppose we could add this to the system variables, but I did not
  • PATH= C:\Program Files (x86)\VMWare\VMWare Workstation\OVFTool\ovftool.exe
• My input .OVA file is located on my E: drive
  • PATH= E:\OVA Files\Oracle_Database_23ai_Developer.ova
• I want the output to be on my E: drive
  • PATH= E:\oracle-23ai-dev

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMWare\VMWare Workstation\OVFTool"
ovftool.exe E:\ova-files\Oracle_Database_23ai_Developer.ova E:\oracle-23ai-dev.ovf

As I was converting a file from Oracle specifically as this is one of the Oracle Developer pre-built VMs, I was challenged to read and accept a terms of use EULA. This is not common, but you just hit space a few times to get to the bottom of the file and then type yes if you agree, at which point the ovfTool fires up and does what it needs to do.

The input file was around 6GB so the conversion process took a few moments in this case. Output:

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMWare\VMWare Workstation\OVFTool>ovftool.exe E:\ova-files\Oracle_Database_23ai_Developer.ova E:\oracle-23ai-dev.ovf
Opening OVA source: E:\ova-files\Oracle_Database_23ai_Developer.ova
Opening OVF target: E:\oracle-23ai-dev.ovf
Writing OVF package: E:\oracle-23ai-dev.ovf
Transfer Completed
Warning:
 - No supported manifest(sha1, sha256, sha512) entry found for: 'Oracle Database 23ai Free-disk001.vmdk'.
 - No manifest file found.
Completed successfully

There are a couple of warnings, but I am not too bothered about those at the moment. The output itself is made of 3 files totalling around 17GB, which is the size of the expanded 6GB OVA file.