So I am currently building the virtual appliances for the company I work for; and our ESX environment is very slow indeed. I’ve built the appliance in VMware player, however it isnt “natively” ESX/vSphere compatible. To combat this, you can use the OVF tool from VMware:
http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere/automationtools/ovf
Once downloaded and installed, it lives generally (on Windows) at “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool”. As this is a COMMAND LINE tool, you will need to fire up cmd (Start > Run > CMD), and then type “cd “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool”” (2 quotes for a reason, given the spaces in name). We can now begin the conversion, which is as simple as:
ovftool.exe “C:\Users\administrator\Documents\Virtual Machines\Appliance\Appliance.vmx” “C:\Users\administrator\Documents\Virtual Machines\Appliance-OVF\Appliance.ovf”
Which will create your .ovf ready Virtual Appliance for you:
Opening VMX source: C:\Users\administrator\Documents\Virtual Machines\Appliance\Appliance.vmx
Opening OVF target: Appliance2.ovf
Writing OVF package: Appliance2.ovf
Transfer Completed
Completed successfully
Once done, its all set – simply “Deploy OVF Template” in ESX/vSphere and it will work!
HTH.
