| OVF Tool 4.5.4 for vCloud Director 10.4 | 27 September 2023 | developer.vmware.com/tools Patch release following vSphere 8.0 GA | Last document update 27 September 2023 Check back for additions and updates to these release notes. < |
About the OVF Tool
The OVF Tool 4.5.4 is a bug fix release to support vCloud Director 10.4. The previous OVF Tool 4.5.0 release was for vSphere 8.0 GA.
VMware OVF Tool is a command-line utility that allows import and export of OVF packages to and from virtual machines running on VMware virtualization platforms. OVF Tool gets called internally by many VMware products.
Before You Begin
You can download the OVF Tool for installation on Windows 64-bit or 32-bit, Linux 64-bit or 32-bit, and Mac OS X 64-bit. The OVF Tool landing page provides a link to the downloads for each release.
OVF Tool 4.5 supports the following operating systems:
- Windows 11 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64)
- Windows 10 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64)
- Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1, 32-bit and 64-bit
- Windows Server 2022, 2019, 2016, and 2012 R2
- MacOS versions including 11 Big Sur and 12 Monterey
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) recent releases
- Recent releases of CentOS and Fedora
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) recent releases
- Ubuntu Linux and variants, recent releases
- VMware Photon OS and Oracle Linux
OVF Tool 4.5.0 added support for vCloud Director (VCD) 10.4, and was tested with VCD 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4.
What's New?
No new features, but three issues found with vCloud Director, and one with VI targets, have been fixed, as described below. For a summary of new features in the 4.5.0 release, see the OVF Tool 4.5 Release Notes.
Compatibility Notices
When customers try to install vCenter Server 7.0.x from a browser on MacOS 10.15 Catalina, 11.x Big Sur, or later MacOS, a popup dialog appears saying “vcsa-deploy.bin cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified” and installation fails with error “ovftool cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.” This is due to greater security in MacOS and OVF Tool not being notarized for Apple. See KB 79416 for workarounds.
New: In this release, OpenSSL libraries were updated to version 1.0.2zi.14602, Curl to version 8.2.1.9716, and c-ares DNS to version 1.19.1.4234.
Resolved Issues
These issues were fixed in OVF Tool 4.5.4:
- New: Unable to import (not found) vApp Template into Catalog.
When the vApp Template catalog had more than 25 pages, OVF Tool could not locate catalogs past 25 due to its one page restriction. In that case customers encountered the error “Catalog not found.” In this release OVF Tool adds support for multiple catalog pages, so the vApp Template can be located on any subsequent catalog page.
- New: Case-sensitive scanning of HTTP headers sometimes failed to match.
When parsing vCloud Director headers, OVF Tool used case sensitive comparison to find relevant items. In some cases, keywords in HTTP header were capitalized unexpectedly, so comparison failed and key values were missed. The fix was to change keyword field search to be case insensitive.
- New: Omitting password caused vCloud Director URL to throw HTTP 403 error.
When users typed name but not password in the source or destination vCloud Directory URL, an HTTP 403 error page resulted, so OVF Tool was not able to access the vApp for download. All other org/vdc operations worked until the point of fetching the vApp. This issue occurred only when username was supplied but password was not. When OVF Tool prompted for the password, the previously supplied username was lost, or in bearer mode, authorization was reset from bearer to basic authentication mode. In either case, vCloud Directory returend a 403 error. The fix was to prevent authorization mode change during HTTP transactions.
- New: Host selection always picks first one from a list of hosts.
When multiple hosts are specified in a resource pool, OVF Tool always picked the first, and would invalidate other hosts in the list. In this release OVF Tool picks a random host in the list and other hosts remain valid. This change only effects VI targets that have not specified a specific host, when there are multiple hosts in a target cluster and OVF Tool must choose.
Known Issues and Workarounds
This issue was discovered during customer testing:
- Network services library required.
OVF Tool calls the network services library libnsl but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and Fedora 27 removed this library. Export fails and message “export failed: unknown error” appears. The solution is to install libnsl and restart the system, as detailed in VMware KB 89515.
This issue remains from previous OVF Tool releases:
- DMG installer for MacOS not notarized.
VMware did not notarize the MacOS installer, so security override is required. An alternative is to unpack the Zip file and run ovftool out of the working directory.
