Chances are good that you’ve run into an OVF/OVA from a variety of sources: as a packaged application or appliance from a vendor, as a download from the VMware community appliances site, or even while physically moving virtual machine files from one location to another. I admit, when I first started administering VMware, I didn’t understand what an OVF or an OVA were, and what their differences are.
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In order to best understand the differences between the two, let’s take a look at what an OVF is first. OVF Defined An OVF refers to the Open Virtualization Format, which is a “ packaging standard designed to address the portability and deployment of virtualization appliances”. The OVF format standard was formed by the Distributed Management Task Force, or DMTF, which is an industry working group comprised of over 160 member companies and organizations. The DMTF board is comprised of 15 technology companies and includes Dell, EMC, VMware, Oracle, & Microsoft. As announced at VMworld 2010, DMTF’s OVF standard was.
An OVF package structure consists of a number of files: a descriptor file, optional manifest and certificate files, optional disk images, and optional resource files (such as ISO’s). The optional disk image files can be VMware vmdk’s, or any other supported disk image file. More information about the OVF format standard can be found. OVA and OVF: The Differences OVF is not only the name of the packaging format standard, but it also refers to the package when distributed as a group of files. An OVA (open virtual appliance or application) is merely a single file distribution of the same file package, stored in the TAR format.
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Personal Desktop. VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion virtualization solutions provide IT pros, developers, and businesses with a streamlined way to deliver, protect, and manage Windows, Linux or Mac desktops and applications on-premises or in the cloud. Navigate to the location where you saved the Virtual Machines OVA file. Right click on the file and select Open with VMware Workstation. A dialog will pop up. Select VMware Workstation. This will open VMware Workstation with an Import Virtual Machine Dialog.
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Did you know that it is possible to bring virtual machines running in Oracle VirtualBox over into VMware’s virtualization software? As more and more customers are making the transition, we get asked over and over how to move the VMs over. This video discusses and demonstrates how to import an Oracle VirtualBox virtual machine into VMware Fusion, Workstation or Player. To import a virtual machine running in Oracle VirtualBox, you must export the virtual machine from VirtualBox to an Open Virtualization Format Archive (.ova file) and then import this file to VMware Fusion, Workstation, or Player.
For additional information, see VMware Knowledge Base article.
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