| OVF Tool 4.6.0 | 18 April 2023 | Build 21259398 at developer.vmware.com/tools Released with vSphere 8.0 Update 1 | Last document update 6 April 2023 Check back for additions and updates to these release notes. |
About the OVF Tool
The OVF Tool 4.6.0 is released with vSphere 8.0 U1 and vCloud Director. The previous OVF Tool 4.5.0 was released with vSphere 8.0.
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 4.6 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
Support for vCloud Director (VCD) 10.4.1 has been added. OVF Tool 4.6.0 was tested with VCD 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4.
What's New?
No new features, but two issues found with vCloud Director interaction are fixed, as described in resolved issues below. For a summary of new features in the 4.5.0 release, see the OVF Tool 4.5 Release Notes.
Many constituent open source components were upgraded.
Compatibility Notices
When customers try to install vCenter Server 7.0.x from a browser on MacOS 10.15 Catalina, or Mac OS 11.x Big Sur, 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.
Resolved Issues
These issues were fixed in OVF Tool 4.6.0:
- 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.
- 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.
- Error: No common hosts found.
When deploying to a vCenter Server and selecting a vSphere Cluster in the target URL, if the target network specified in network mapping has many hosts attached to it, OVF Tool mistakenly returned the error “No common hosts found” (see “Setting OVF Network Maps When Deploying to vSphere” in the OVF Tool User Guide). The workaround wass to specify, after cluster name, a host with access to both the desired network and datastore. A fix was incorporated in this release.
Known Issues and Workarounds
These issues were reported by customers or discovered during testing:
- OVF Tool interaction with Apple Silicon.
The MacOS 64-bit binary extracted from Zip runs on ARM processors (M1 and M2) if the Rosetta2 emulator is already installed. OVF Tool export might have difficulties with certain hardware specifics, but these issues have not been fully characterized.
- 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.
