{"id":23,"date":"2018-12-10T10:04:21","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T15:04:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/?p=23"},"modified":"2019-02-11T07:50:47","modified_gmt":"2019-02-11T12:50:47","slug":"ova-deployment-issues-in-vcenter-6-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/?p=23","title":{"rendered":"OVA deployment issues in vCenter 6.5+"},"content":{"rendered":"

A team member was recently tasked with deploying a number of OVA templates provided by a vendor. There was difficulty with the OVA deployment failing after sitting on “Validating” for a long time. This would usually happen after selecting a compute resource in vCenter. The vendor stated they have seen this numerous times with vCenter 6.5 clients. They advised to remove a host from the cluster and deploy directly to that host. Being a person that cannot accept hacky workarounds I decided to dive into it. We are currently on vCenter 6.7 U1 with 6.5 ESXi U3 hosts. I extracted the OVA and started looking into the OVF XML. Everything looked to be formatted correctly, but I still felt vCenter wasn’t liking something in the XML. I began troubleshooting by commenting out entire <ProductSections><\/strong> elements of the XML. Commenting out the first set of options did not work, but the second did. Looking closer at the second showed a very long ‘ValueMap’<\/strong> string for the time zone selector in the ovf:qualifiers<\/strong> attribute. The most likely scenario was this this causing the issue with its length and complexity. I decided to clear out the entire\u00a0ovf:qualifiers<\/strong> attribute (empty quotes) and hard code the value to be ‘America\/New_York’<\/strong>. I then saved the OVF, initiated a new deployment (selecting all VMDKs, the OVF, but excluding the MF file as that would cause a checksum error), and hitting next… VOILA! I was able to successfully deploy this OVF without any errors. I also performed the same action for all of the other vendor templates.<\/p>\n

Original time zone property:\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Modified time zone property:\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I didn’t dig further, but I imagine the vendor’s standalone host hack worked because the web GUI on the host has different code (maybe missing a bug) than vCenter. I’d also like to note that this could be accomplished by using the Import-VApp<\/strong> PowerCLI PowerShell cmdlet (without modifying any files), but you’d also have to create a\u00a0OvfConfiguration<\/strong>\u00a0hashtable object to pass as a parameter which may be more work than it is worth.<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A team member was recently tasked with deploying a number of OVA templates provided by a vendor. There was difficulty with the OVA deployment failing after sitting on “Validating” for a long time. This would usually happen after selecting a compute resource in vCenter. The vendor stated they have seen this numerous times with vCenter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[10,11,12,13,14,9,15],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vmware","tag-esx","tag-esxi","tag-ova","tag-ovf","tag-vcenter","tag-vmware","tag-xml"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124,"href":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.markdepalma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}