Thursday, November 17, 2011

Convert .ova to .ovf in Linux

I just spent the better part of 20 minutes searching for a method to convert a .ova file downloaded from the web to the .ovf format required by my version of VirtualBox-ose. VMWare has a program called OVFTool that may do this conversion but requires registering to download and may only be available as a windows binary. After hitting several dead ends I found the simple answer. As it turns out the .ova file format is a tar image!

tar xvf SomeVMImage.ova

will dump the .ovf and related files. Easy as pi!

10 comments:

  1. Thanks, Exactly what I needed today !

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  2. I wish I had found this a few months back. It would have saved me a handful of grief. Thanks.

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  3. Thanks for that! Saved me a lot of time this morning.

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  4. Haha, so the whole tool is just a Windows wrapper around tar?? Thanks for the tip!

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  5. It saved me lots of time...!
    Thank you.

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  6. Thanks, man. I did it the opposite way and worked for me

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