I have a Win7 box with VMware Workstation 12.5 installed where I build all of the OVFs required by my team.
Recently I upgraded from vSphere 6 to 6.5 and that comes of course with the pain point made mandatory - the web client.
It's not enough that everything I need to do going from thick client to web client is now scattered all over the place like going from XP to Win10 without trying to miss a beat.
Something major that I need to do, deploying OVFs isn't even working anymore...
First things first, I'm in vcenter and deploy the OVF after maybe 30 minutes right at the end of the deployment received an error regarding a checksum on the manifest file. Well this is umm, your manifest file VMware created by the latest version of VMware Workstation. Hmm.
So I've traversed a few roads with this OVF stuff over the years, I checked into the virtual hardware, it's a new server 2016 VM I'm trying to deploy so I wanted to make sure I didn't have anything messed up with virtual hardware versions or virtual hardware types that have been problematic in prior versions. Nope, everything looks to be ok.
Second try at deploying -- during the browse to files I didn't select the manifest file, I left it out, the import appears to be successful, no checksum errors.
Attempt to boot up the VM and receive this message:
A disk read error occurred
Press control + alt + del to restart
Hmm, is this OVF corrupt? So I re-export it from Workstation and redeploy it... same error.
Do I have SAN issues? Redeployed to a different datastore on a different array... same error.
Is there like some incompatibility with the virtual SCSI controller on 6.5? I am running LSI Logic SAS, should be fine. I tried one or two others, ... same error.
Upgraded the virtual hardware, ... same error.
Upgraded the OVF tool VMware Workstation uses to the latest version available 4.2..re-export OVF, import, ... same error.
Eventually hit google and see a bunch of stuff in the 6.5 release notes for OVF, nothing however seems to match up exactly with what I'm seeing here.
Spoke with a couple of co-workers who claimed to have deployed the same OVFs that I built for them on standalone ESXi 6.5 (no vcenter) and claimed to have not experienced this issue!
Now I go to one of the standalone ESXi 6 servers that I have admin rights on in another dept. Deploy the same OVF, it deploys with no error and boots right up.
Hmm, so now I shut down the VM and export it from the stand alone ESXi server, import it to my 6.5 vSphere, same error, disk read error.
So that rules out Workstation but can anyone tell me what's going on with this?
I have wasted a good portion of several days on this issue and seem no further along to understanding it.