OVF Tool 4.6.3 | June 2024 | Downloads on Developer Portal
Released with vSphere 8.0 Update 3
Check back for additions and updates to these release notes, marked New.

About the OVF Tool

The OVF Tool 4.6.3 is released with vSphere 8.0 U3. The previous OVF Tool 4.6.2 was released with vSphere 8.0 U2.

VMware OVF Tool is a command-line utility that imports and exports 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 MacOS 64-bit. The OVF Tool landing page provides a link to the downloads for each release.

OVF Tool 4.6.3 supports the following operating systems:

  • Windows 11 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 12 Monterey to 14 Sonoma
  • 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?

These are new features in OVF Tool 4.6.3:

  • Using OpenSSL3 with TLS 1.3 protocol.

    In vSphere 8.0 Update 3, vCenter Server moves to full compliance with FIPS (the Federal Information Processing Standard), including mandatory use of OpenSSL version 3 and TLS 1.3 protocol. OVF Tool has been updated to use OpenSSL version 3 with TLS 1.3 as well.

  • Add multi-page support for VCD Catalogs.

    Previous releases of OVF Tool had a maxium page limit of 25 items. When importing VM and vApp templates into the vCloud Director (VCD) Catalog, customers ran up against this limit, resulting in “Catalog not found” and “No vAppTemplate found” errors. This release adds support for VCD Catalogs with multiple page results. When queries have multi-page results for Catalogs and VDC, OVF Tool searches again if the name is not found initially, rather than returning “not found” if the first page result lacks the searched-for name.

  • Call Datacenter power-on for compatibility with DRS.

    Rather than use VirtualMachine specific powerOnVM, which fails to account for the current state of Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS), this release calls powerOnMultiVM if the VI target is a VC, in other words managed by vCenter in a vSphere cluster. VirtualMachine specific powerOnVM is still used for a stand-alone VM.

  • Support for 4Kn virtual disk format.

    OVF Tool can support native 4K disk format (4Kn) with the options below, but might not communicate properly with servers until the release of vSphere 9. 

    • vmw:Config ovf:required="false" vmw:key="virtualDiskFormat" vmw:value="native_4k"
  • Open source components.

    These constituent open source components were upgraded: openssl to version 3.0.13 (and 1.0.2zj for Apache Xerces), curl to 8.7, nghttp2 to 1.61, and zlib to 1.3.1.

For a summary of new features in previous releases, see the OVF Tool 4.6.0 Release Notes and the OVF Tool 4.6.2 Release Notes.

Resolved Issues

These issues are fixed in OVF Tool 4.6.3:

  • Fix host name selection bug.

    When using OVF Tool to upload and download VMs by host name from vSphere infrastructure, the error message “Failed to connect to host name due to: Couldn't resolve host name” sometimes appeared. The workaround was to use IP address instead of host name. Hostname selection is fixed in this release by clearing the previous name string and by randomizing the deploy target within range of the host array.

  • Fix CoresPerSocket generation for OVF parser.

    OVF Tool had a bug where non-processor XML elements could be exported with CoresPerSocket element. This release fixes the OVF parser to output the CoresPerSocket value only when the XML element is type Processor (CPU).

  • Fix issue with Boot order and StorageProfile sections in OVF.

    When an OVF file specified both BootOrderSection and StorageGroupSection, resource pool import could fail with (Storage) “Profile not found” error. In some cases it worked with vSphere but not with VCD. This release is more lenient about varied ordering of boot and storage policies.

  • Fix (or feature) to add support for VMIOP with virtual GPU.

    The VMIOP (virtual machine input output plugin) device is used for backing of virtual GPUs. This fix adds support for VMIOP with virtual GPU parameters for bidirectional conversions, including VMX and OVF file processing.

Compatibility Notices

When customers try to install vCenter Server from a browser on MacOS 10.15 Catalina, and later, 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.

Known Issues and Workarounds

This known issue was not fixed in time for this release:

  • OVF Tool rejects added XML metadata.

    When a vendor places additional XML metadata into an OVA file, deployment can fail with an “Unsupported element” error. This will be fixed by being more forgiving about placement of added XML items.

These issues were reported in earlier releases:

  • ResourcePool import fails with OVF reference to empty storage policy.

    When an OVF contains both StorageGroupSection and BootOrderSection, deployment with ResourcePool.ImportVApp fails, because even a valid storage policy is converted to profileId = "" (empty string). The workaround is to manually remove BootOrderSection from the OVF if StorageGroupSection is valid, or instead set EmptyProfileSpec for the disk.

  • OVF Tool interaction with Apple Silicon.

    The MacOS 64-bit binary extracted from Zip runs on ARM processors (M1 and M2) when the Rosetta2 emulator is already installed. OVF Tool export might have difficulties with certain hardware specifics, but no such issues have been reported so far.

  • 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 the message “export failed: unknown error” appears. The solution is to install libnsl and restart the Linux machine, as detailed in VMware KB 89515.

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