OVF to OVA Conversion

Now that you have your VMControl working and have used it you capture a virtual appliance you might want to move it to other environments, such as importing it into IWD to deploy on any number of environments.  The best thing to do is convert it to a ova, which just happens a tar file, just remember AIX tar files are limited to 8GB.


First you will need to log onto the Systems Director and take a note of its unique identifier, this is located as follows -
Left task menu -> System Configuration -> VMControl. Once this is open select the 'Virtual Appliances' tab followed by the 'Image Repository', then just select the relevant one if you have more and you should then see a field called 'Unique Identifier'.


Now we have the identifier from the NIM master, perform the following steps as the root user-
Change to the appliance directory of the virtual appliance that you want to export using the following command:
    # cd /export/nim/appliances/<unique identifier>

Copy the .ovf file, the mksysb file found in the directory to a new location.

In the copied .ovf files, change all file reference to use a relative path -
    <ovf:File ovf:href="file:///export/nim/appliances/<Unique Identifier>/image1.mksysb" ovf:id="vimRef1" ovf:size="<size>"/>
    to:
    <ovf:File ovf:href="image1.mksysb" ovf:id="vimRef1" ovf:size="<size>"/>

Now we can create our tar achive ensuring that the ovf is the first file in the archive -
    # tar xvf <file-name>.ovf <file-name>.ova

    # tar uvf <file-name>.mksysb <file-name>.ova