Exporting a Virtual Machine

A virtual machine can be packaged for transport. vSphere provides a method to do so by exporting a virtual machine in an open virtual machine format (OVF), which is an open standard that was developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) with cooperation from VMware, Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and other companies.

Getting ready

To be able to export a virtual machine to OVF, it needs to be in a Powered Off state. Starting with vSphere 6.5.x and 6.7, you can no longer export VMs to OVA using the web/HTML5 clients.

You can convert an OVF package into OVA format using the VMware OVF tool (https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/).

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