If you have an occasion to export large amounts of VM’s to OVA’s like I currently do, you may find the following useful for creating a script to do just that. Cheers!

Download OVF Tool

Download OVF Tool installer from the following link:

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=OVFTOOL400&productId=353

Browse to OVF Tool

Locate OVF Tool tool from the command line. For me on Mac (using Fusion):

/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/VMware OVF Tool

For Windows, it should be:

C:Program FilesVMwareVMware OVF Tool

Export

I will break down the arguments individually, since this won’t be exactly the same for you. Here’s the full command I used in my lab:

./ovftool --noSSLVerify vi://root@10.50.0.245/vCenter ~/Desktop/vCenter.ova

./ovftool

This is the tool. On Windows, you might need to include .exe or something. I don’t have any of that garbage to test this on 😉

–noSSLVerify

If you’re wiser than me, you might want to leave this flag out. I just put it in so that I wouldn’t have to type ‘yes’ to accept the SSL cert thumbprint.

vi://

This is the path specific to ESXi/vCenter. If you were trying to export a Workstation VM, you could just as easily use C: for instance.

root@10.50.0.245

This works out to be [username]@[host or VC] . You could also include a password if you’re scripting and don’t care if it’s in clear text. [username]:[password]@[host]

/vCenter

This is the path to your VM. There’s a number of different ways to use this tool, including pointing at a datastore, searching using queries, etc. If the VM is in a resource pool or folder, you’ll need to specify, but if the VM is in the root resource pool of the host like mine, you can just type the name.

~/Desktop/vCenter.ova

This is the filename on the machine I’m running the OVF Tool on. Name your output file here.

Finally…

Here’s a screenshot of what a successful export looks like.

If you have any trouble with the export, you can run the command with the following flag to generate a log file to help with troubleshooting:

--x:logfile=

Also, for more detailed usage on OVF Tool, check out the best two resources I know of, VMware and VMware’s own William Lam.