The Windows Hyper-V technology does not fully support the OVF industry standard. Microsoft documents a complex and somewhat limited procedure on their page about converting OVF files to Hyper-V. There are third-party conversion tools available that simplify this deployment scenario, for example StarWind’s free V2V Converter which worked well in our tests.
You can import the OVA file into a VMware ESXi Datacenter via VMware vCenter using VMware ovftool, from the PC or server you run ovftool.
Remember to set the Virtual Machine name you like, the datastore you want, the network you want, and point it at the server you want to deploy to.
Run commands like this:
In this example the VMware vCenter 6.5 install has created:
FQDN ‘photon-machine’ with
user ‘administrator‘,
sso domain name ‘vsphere.localdomain‘, and
sso password ‘Vagrant1!‘
which must be escaped when used in this context using ovftool:
escaped password: ‘Vagrant1\!‘
monolithicSparsemonolithicFlattwoGbMaxExtentSparsetwoGbMaxExtentFlatseSparse (vSphere target)eagerZeroedThick (vSphere target)thin(vSphere target)thick (vSphere target)sparseflatDetermine the Datacenter name:
Determine the Datacenter host IP or FQDN: Import Opmantek-20200708-VM9-Centos7.2003-3-64bit.ova which is in the current directory, in this example using vSphere option –diskMode=thin: ovftool –acceptAllEulas –name=”omk_vm9_centos7″ –diskMode=thin Opmantek-20200708-VM9-Centos7.2003-3-64bit.ova vi://administrator@vsphere.localdomain:Vagrant1\!@photon-machine/Datacenter1/host/172.16.37.128 |
NOTE – We do not support OVA import to VMware ESXi directly or via VMware vCenter using a browser.
NOTE – We require the VMware OVF Tool if importing to VMware ESXi directly or via VMware vCenter:
You can import the OVA file directly into ESXi using VMware ovftool, from the PC or server you run ovftool.
Remember to set the Virtual Machine name you like, the datastore you want, the network you want, and point it at the server you want to deploy to.
Run the command like this:
| ovftool –name=”NMIS9″ -dm=”thin” -ds=datastore_name-number -nw=”network_name-number” Opmantek-20200708-VM9-Centos7.2003-3-64bit.ova vi://user:escaped_password@host_ip_address Opening OVA source: Opmantek-20200708-VM9-Centos7.2003-3-64bit.ova Opening VI target: vi://user@host_ip_address:443/ Deploying to VI: vi://user@host_ip_address:443/ Transfer Completed Warning: – No supported manifest(sha1, sha256, sha512) entry found for: ‘omk-vm8-centos7-disk001.vmdk’. – No supported manifest(sha1, sha256, sha512) entry found for: ‘omk-vm8-centos7-disk002.vmdk’. – No manifest file found. Completed successfully |
Even though, there are no caveats in relation to importing the Virtual Appliance using VMware Fusion,
it is important to remind users to grant permission to VMware Fusion to fully execute on OSX, specially after installing it.
The permission should be granted on System Preferences > Security & Privacy
The Opmantek Virtual Appliance ships with the virtual machine hardware version set very low for maximum compatibility, but you may want to upgrade the hardware version to a higher level (to leverage performance benefits, remove memory limitations, etc.) as described on the VMware website
Below is an example of how to enable Host I/O Cache using VirtualBox:
It’s now highly unlikely that VirtualBox users will find themselves at the dracut emergency shell prompt when first booting our vm that runs CentOS 7.
We continue to provide this information in case needed:
After it boots login as normal and try the try the following dacut command (you can find login credentials here).
dracut -f /boot/ <kernel_image> <kernel_name>
