Video Tutorial - Uploading OVF/OVA Files to Navisite Cloud Director Using the OVFTool
Audio Transcript - Uploading OVF/OVA Files to Navisite Cloud Director Using the OVFTool
Hello everyone and welcome! My name is Hannah Warren. I’m here today for Navisite, giving a brief demonstration of our Navisite Cloud Director (or NCD) platform, which you can access through the Proximity login portal.
Quick note about today’s tutorial: this is a general-level tutorial with our product in its current iteration. If you have specific questions or issues with your environment, please make sure you contact our Customer Service department.
For a more detailed tutorial, please visit our Knowledge Base, which is linked on the screen (http://navisite.uservoice.com) and also in the video description below.
And with that, we’ll get started!
This demonstration will provide a step-by-step tutorial for uploading OVF and OVA files into NCD.
In case you’re unfamiliar with OVF files, OVF stands for “open virtualization format,” which is an open standard for packaging and distributing software to be run in virtual machines.
Because OVF is a standard, it is not specific to VMware. For more on the differences between OVF and OVA files, please check out the video description.
For today’s demonstration, we’ll use a VMware-provided tool called the OVFTool in order to upload an OVA file into NCD.
To use the OVFTool, you will first have to create an account on VMware.com, and then download and install the tool on the machine currently containing the OVF you want to upload to NCD.
I have already installed the OVFTool on my local host, which happens to be a Windows Server 2008 machine. The VMware OVFTool does support multiple operating systems, so check the VMware knowledge base to ensure your OS is compatible. At the time of this recording, we recommend that you install version 4.1.0 of the OVFTool.
You can use the OVFTool to upload vApps, vApp templates, VMs, or VM templates into vCloud Director – just note that if you upload a VM all by its lonesome, it will be incorporated in a vApp automatically within NCD.
To begin the required upload using the OVFTool, NCD will provide you the command.
The process of uploading OVF/OVA files is pretty simple, but the location of the generated commands varies slightly in NCD, depending on whether you are uploading an actual VM, a vApp, or a VM or vApp template.
We’ll show you how to upload a vApp, but after we’re done doing that, we’ll also show you where to get the command to do the same procedure uploading a vApp template instead.
To start we will get the necessary OVFTool command from NCD.
From the Dashboard, we’ll click “Assets” on the left navigation menu, and then “vApps.”
On the vApps list page, we’ll then click the “Upload” button.
This brings up a pop-up labeled “Upload vApp.”
For this demonstration, we’re using the OVFTool, so we’ll switch to the right tab.
Once we have the OVFTool selected, we see that there are few settings we need to provide before NCD will give us the OVFTool command we need.
In the vCloud menu we will start by selecting the vCloud datacenter that is the destination for this uploaded file.
We will then move to the next drop-down menu and select the virtual data center, or vDataCenter, within our vCloud.
The next field defines the format of the file we are uploading. In this case, it’s an OVA.
And finally, we want to specify what we want the vApp to be called when it is uploaded. I’m uploading the vApp that we downloaded in a separate video segment, so I’m going to call it “vApp-Container-2.”
You’ll see that this command has been changing as we change those settings.
We’ll be able to select this, copy it… and you will notice that you do still need to change the “filename.ova” to actual name of the file that you’ll be uploading from your local machine. So, I’m going to do that in Notepad first, just because it’s a little easier to edit things in this application.
And I’ll select all, copy… in my command window, once I’ve got the correct command with the correct filename, I want to make sure I first go to the correct directory where I can find this file that I want to upload. So let’s do a quick search here – and yes, I’m in the correct place. You’ll want to make sure your current directory is also the location of your file.
Now that we’ve done that, I should be able to click Enter.
We’ll need to enter my login information – this is the same information that you use to log in to NCD.
While the OVFTool does its thing, let’s talk about what exactly is happening here. To start, the OVFTool will start the upload process and will display the upload “Progress” – here as a percentage - as the file is copied to a temporary transfer buffer in vCloudDirector. When the upload fully completes, the OVFTool will exit with a status of “Transfer Completed, Completed Successfully,” but the work is not yet quite done.
With a copy of the ovf file fully transferred into vCloudDirector, vCD will then start the process of recreating the VM or vApp specified by your ovf file and building the vApp up in the virtual data center that you specified earlier.
You can check on the status of this process in a couple of ways – either by investigating the task status shown in NCD, which would be here, or by viewing the vDataCenter you specified the vApp to be loaded into in vCloud.
The duration of the overall upload process depends on three variables: the bandwidth of your connection to NCD, the size of the item being uploaded, and vCloud Director loading at the time of your request.
Based on these variables, it’s very difficult to say for sure how long the process will take overall, although as I mentioned, you can monitor the progress via the OVFTool, (and within NCD and vCloudDirector) so you can at least have an idea of how much progress you are making.
If you experience a network interruption while using the ovftool and the file upload process stalls, you will need to restart the ovftool upload process again. To do this, simply hit the “up arrow” and the press “Enter” in the command window.
When your OVF import is complete, NCD will show a successful completed task in the task listing menu at the top right. You should also be able to navigate to the vApp you uploaded and inspect to make sure it is what you expected.
Note that the maximum file size for uploads using the OVFTool is 500 GB thick provisioned; if you need to upload an OVF file larger than 500 GB, please contact our Customer Service department for assistance.
To round out our segment today, let’s go over how to get the OVFTool command for uploading a template. On the left-hand menu, go to “Assets” and then click “templates.” From here, we can simply click the upload button, which will open the upload templates popup.
And we’ll go to the right tab for OVFTool. From here, you’ll configure the upload just as we did previously, although instead of specifying a vDataCenter you will instead specify which Catalog within your environment you would like your template uploaded to.
You can then use the command line generated in the command window just like we did before to upload your template into NCD.
That wraps up this video installment. Thanks for tuning in to this demonstration in NCD. As always, we’d appreciate your feedback! If you found this video helpful or have ideas for videos in the future, we do source those from comments on our content, so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us. You can follow our YouTube channel for future videos, and there are 24/7 detailed demonstrations with screenshots and step-by-step “How Tos” at our knowledge base: https://navisite.uservoice.com/knowledgebase
Thanks for tuning in. I’m Hannah Warren, and I’ll see you next time!