Open VMDK is an assistant tool for creating Open Virtual Appliance (OVA). An OVA is a tar archive file with Open Virtualization Format (OVF) files inside, which is composed of an OVF descriptor with extension .ovf, a virtual machine disk image file with extension .vmdk, and a manifest file with extension .mf.

OVA requires stream optimized disk image file (.vmdk) so that it can be easily streamed over a network link. This tool can convert flat disk image or sparse disk image to stream optimized disk image, and then create OVA with the converted stream optimized disk image by using an OVF descriptor template.

Firstly, you need to download and extract open-vmdk-master.zip and extract it:

$ wget https://github.com/vmware/open-vmdk/archive/master.zip
$ unzip master.zip

Then, run below commands to build and install it:

$ cd open-vmdk-master
$ make
$ make install

Note: After installation, /usr/bin/vmdk-convert and /usr/bin/mkova.sh will be installed. If you hope to change default installation place, such as $HOME/bin/vmdk-convert, specify "PREFIX" while running make install:

$ PREFIX=$HOME make install

Thus, you will see the binary vmdk-convert and script mkova.sh under $HOME/bin/. In such case, make sure you have added $HOME/bin in your PATH environment variable.

Below example shows how to create an Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) from vSphere virtual machine. Presume the virtual machine's name is testvm, and virtual machine files include:

testvm-312d29db.hlog
testvm-flat.vmdk
testvm.nvram
testvm.vmdk
testvm.vmsd
testvm.vmx
vmware.log

1. Copy testvm folder to TESTSVM_PATH on the machine where you have open-vmdk installed.
2. Convert vmfs raw data extent file of the VM to OVF streaming format.

$ cd $TESTSVM_PATH
$ vmdk-convert testvm-flat.vmdk

After converting, a new vmdk file dst.vmdk will be created under $TESTSVM_PATH folder. Or, you can specify the new vmdk file name by running

$ vmdk-convert testvm-flat.vmdk disk1.vmdk

After converting, a new vmdk file disk1.vmdk will be created under $TESTSVM_PATH folder.

You can also set the VMware Tools version installed in your VM disk by add -t option

$ vmdk-convert -t 11264 testvm-flat.vmdk disk1.vmdk

This will set ddb.toolsVersion to 11264 in the metadata of disk1.vmdk. By default, the ddb.toolsVersion will be set to 2147483647. See https://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions for all released VMware Tools versions. See https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/83068 for instructions to add ddb.toolsVersion to an exiting OVF/OVA template.

3. Run mkova.sh to create OVA with specific hardware version.

$ mkova.sh ova_name path_to_ovf_template disk1.vmdk

Where,

• ova_name is your OVA name without .ova suffix.
• dst.vmdk is the new vmdk file converted in step 2.
• path_to_ovf_template is the path to .ovf template file. There are 8 .ovf templates files can be used.
  • ova/template.ovf is the template for BIOS VM with hardware version 7.
  • ova/template-hw10.ovf is the template for BIOS VM with hardware version 10.
  • ova/template-hw11-bios.ovf is the template for BIOS VM with hardware version 11.
  • ova/template-hw11-uefi.ovf is the template for UEFI VM with hardware version 11.
  • ova/template-hw13-bios.ovf is the template for BIOS VM with hardware version 13.
  • ova/template-hw13-uefi.ovf is the template for UEFI VM with hardware version 13.
  • ova/template-hw14-bios.ovf is the template for BIOS VM with hardware version 14.
  • ova/template-hw14-uefi.ovf is the template for UEFI VM with hardware version 14.

If you want to add more than 1 disk into the OVA, firstly convert all flat vmdk files, and add new converted vmdk files by following path_to_ovf_template. For example, below command creates an OVA with 3 disks

$ mkova.sh ova_name path_to_ovf_template disk1.vmdk disk2.vmdk disk3.vmdk

Here mutiple disks are only supported to be attached to one SCSI controller, and at most 15 disks can be added in one OVA.

By default, the OVA will be created with 2 cpus and 1024 MB memory. You can also use environment variable NUM_CPUS and MEM_SIZE to change the default number of cpu and memory size.

4. After mkova.sh completes, you would be able to see the final OVA under $TESTSVM_PATH folder.