After upgrading my home lab recently to vSphere 6.5, I also updated some of the related utilities such as the various SDKs and CLIs. One of the CLIs that I had updated was the latest version of OVFTool which is now at 4.2. I use OVFTool extensively to automate various Virtual Machine deployments (import/export). While testing out a […]
Heads Up: OVF/OVA always deployed as Thick on VSAN when using vSphere Web Client
Just wanted to give folks a heads up on an issue that a colleague of mines recently identified when provisioning Virtual Appliances (OVF/OVA) onto a VSAN datastore when using the vSphere Web Client. He found that regardless of the VSAN Storage Policy that was selected, whether it is the default VSAN Storage Policy or a custom […]
Caveat when deploying Photon Controller Installer (v0.8) OVA to vCenter Server
I have recently been spending some time exploring the latest release of Photon Controller (v0.8). One of the new features in this release is the ability to deploy Photon Controller using a new UI installer provided by a virtual appliance. Since I already have a vCenter Server running in my lab environment, I decided to deploy the Photon […]
Slick way of deploying OVF/OVA directly to ESXi & vCenter Server using govc CLI
I have been meaning to write about this neat little feature that was added to the govc CLI late last year that allows you to easily deploy any OVF/OVA without the need of ovftool. You might ask, why not use ovftool? Well, if you just need to perform a very basic OVF/OVA deploy and prefer not to install […]
Hidden OVF 2.0 capablity found in the vSphere Content Library
There are a number of new and useful capabilities that have been introduced in the OVF 2.0 specification. One such capability which I thought was really interesting and that could easily benefit VMware-based solutions is the ScaleOutSection feature. This feature allows you specify the number of instances of a given Virtual Appliance to instantiate at deployment time by making use of […]