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Luke
Asked: 2012-10-02 11:30:23 +0800 CST

Is there a faster way to deploy an OVA template?

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I need to deploy vSphere Server Appliance 5.1. I have vSphere Client running locally and my internet upload is capped at 3 Mbps. It says it's going to take about 200 minutes to upload.

When selecting a URL as opposed to a local file, does vSphere Client download it locally and then upload, or does it download the OVA directly to the server?

My goal is to avoid waiting 3 1/2 hours for this to upload.

If specifying a URL isn't any faster, are there any other methods that would allow me to deploy from the datacenter instead of my office?

We don't have any Windows VM's installed on our cluster. So unfortunately I don't have a Windows machine with faster upload speed.

vmware-vsphere

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You will need to log in to something on the datacenter side to download the file. It sounds like you are using linux VMs, so maybe just do a WGET to get the appliance directly from the VMWare website. After that, OVFTool will allow you to deploy an appliance to an ESXi host or cluster.

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  2. Try logging on to the vSphere web interface one https://appliance:9443 (where appliance is the name/ip address of your vSphere appliance). This web interface is meant to replace the vSphere VI client anyway in the future, so it's fairly complete (although there's no update manager for it yet).

    Given that future major releases of vSphere won't have a GUI client, you may as well get used to using the web interface now. As a long-time vSphere user I'm finding it difficult and frustrating to pull away from the GUI client, but for multi-platform management I can understand why they're doing it.

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  3. you need to download ovftool.exe and then run the following command. It is not fully working for me, trying to figure out how to specify the datastore the ova should be imported on.....

    ovftool "path_to_your_OVA_or_OVF_file" vi:root:pwd@esx_hostname_or_ip

    From page 44 in the OVFTool User Guide:

    Deploying an OVF Package Directly on an ESXi Host The following command deploys an OVF package on an ESXi host.

     ovftool package.ovf vi://my.esx-machine.example.com/
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