Sunday 20 January 2013

OVA VMware Fusion

Hey there,

I'm using VMware Fusion Version 4 and wanted to open a .ova file. I just wanted to play around a little on https://www.hacking-lab.com/, and the they provide a full virtual machine that is ready to connect to their test network via VPN. Unfortunately VMware Fusion 4 won't open it. According to the docs of VMware Fusion 5 you can just import an .ova file (http://pubs.vmware.com/fusion-5/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.fusion.help.doc%2FGUID-275EF202-CF74-43BF-A9E9-351488E16030.html), but that's not working in VMware Fusion 4.

I just found a tool called OVF Tool by VMware. Yo can download it here:

https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/get-download?downloadGroup=OVF-TOOL-3-0-1 (you will need an account on VMware to download it)

After installing the command ovftool is availabe in "/Applications/VMware OVF Tool" in the CLI.

Here you can get the full user guide of ovtool or just enter

# ./ovftool --help

at the command prompt in the folder "/Applications/VMware OVF Tool".

By using the following command I could convert the .ova to .vmwarevm. You just need to enter the source file and your target where you want to save it:

./ovftool /Users/<username>/Downloads/lcd596vmware8.ova  /Users/<username>/Downloads/lcd596vmware8.vmwarevm


Maybe you can also just convert it to vmx or another fileformat which is more efficient, because now the file size increased from 2.6GB to 7 GB. But at least I can open it now.