OVF Tool Highlights

The OVF Tool provides the following key features:

• Supports import and generation of OVA packages (OVA is part of the OVF standard, and contains all the files of a virtual machine or vApp in a single file.)
• Directly converts between any vSphere, vCloud Director, VMX, or OVF source format to any vSphere, vCloud Director, VMX, or OVF target format
• Accesses OVF sources using HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, or from a local file
• Deploys and exports vApp configurations on vSphere 4.0 (and all newer) targets and on vCloud Director 1.5 (and all newer) targets
• Provides options to power on a VM or vApp after deployment, and to power off a virtual machine or vApp before exporting (caution advised)
• Show information about the content of any source in probe mode
• Provides context sensitive error messages for vSphere and vCloud Director sources and targets, showing possible completions for common errors, such as an incomplete vCenter inventory path or missing datastore and network mappings
• Provides an optional output format to support scripting when another program calls OVF Tool
• Uses new optimized upload and download API (optimized for vSphere 4.0 and newer)
• Signs OVF packages and validates OVF package signatures
• Validates XML Schema of OVF 1.0 and OVF 1.1 descriptors
• Import and export of OVF packages into a vApprun 1.0 workspace.

  For more information about vApprun, see http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vapprun.