A couple of weeks ago I ran into an issue stopping me from importing an OVA and today I came across another issue relating to the Web Client not able to import OVF packages with compressed disks.
There seems to be a lot of issues to do with OVF/A operations in vSphere 6.5 Update 1…in fact there are 187 mentioned of OVF and 95 mentions of OVA in the release notes. Searching through the release notes I found a specific entry relating to this issue that I came across and it’s work around.
Deploying an OVF template containing compressed file references might fail
When you deploy an OVF template containing compressed files references (typically compressed using gzip), the operation fails.
The following is an example of an OVF element in the OVF descriptor:
<References>
<File ovf:size="458" ovf:href="valid_disk.vmdk.gz" ovf:compression="gzip" ovf:id="file1"></File>
</References>
The workaround is to download OVFTool and run a simple command to convert the OVF or OVA template to one without the compressed file…which in effect its just a copy of the original.
Seems like a strange fix but it works!
References:
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/rn/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-65-release-notes.html
