virtual-machinevmwarevirtualizationovfova

Custom Open Virtual Format (OVF)

As everyone knows OVF is Open Virtual Format for exporting virtual appliances it is helps in many aspects and reliable. I got to know about OVF from wiki Open Virtualization Format. Hypervisors like VMware bare-metal hypervisor, Virtualbox, Hyprer-V, has provided their tools for converting VM to OVF/OVA formats. Got to know from below helpful links VMware, Hyper-v,VirtualBox.

But how can i do the custom OVF if i have only VHD,VHDX,VDI,VMDK files of some Virtual Machine? Does there any difference between VMDK and VMDK from exported OVF? Is there any programmatic approach by using which i can do this easily?

Thanks

Solution

  • VMware OVF package consist of sparse disk. I did it simple way with the help of VirtualBox, VirtualBox provides you command line option for disk conversion so you can get your disk in target format and then create package, Package consist of .OVF file and .MF file along with disks in one folder.

    .MF File consist of SHA1 check-sum of all files in package

    .OVF consist of deployment configuration i.e Controller, Disks, RAM, CPU etc.

    No need to study everything just export some VM in OVF format and then refer that .OVF and do changes as you want and update check-sum in .MF file