Ovftool

Ovftool

Ovftool is a command line utility that you can run to import/export a VM which is following the OVF standards between different virtualisation products.

There's command line variations for most major operating systems including Windows, Linux and macOS.

This utility also comes bundled with vSphere, VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion. Each of those products provides a user interface for accessing this tool.

Command line example

Export a vSphere VM called "Pete" to ovf format on a Linux host to the current folder:

ovftool vi://root@vspherehost.local.lan/Pete .

The ovftool command will prompt for the password that belongs to user "root" for host "vspherehost.local.lan".

This will create a folder "Pete" in your current folder with files that look like:

# ls -alh Pete/
total 2.3G
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Dec 11 14:01 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Dec 11 13:54 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.3G Dec 11 14:01 Pete-disk1.vmdk
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.5K Dec 11 14:01 Pete-file1.nvram
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  273 Dec 11 14:01 Pete.mf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9.3K Dec 11 14:01 Pete.ovf

see also

https://code.vmware.com/web/tool/4.4.0/ovf

https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/ovf